Impressions of South Africa Part 9

Of these railways the trunk-line with its branches was constructed by and is (except the parts which traverse the Orange Free State and the Transvaal) owned by the government of Cape Colony. It has latterly paid very well. The line from Durban to the Transvaal border at Charlestown belongs to the Natal government, and is also a considerable source of revenue. The rest of this line, from Charlestown northward through the Transvaal, is the property of a Dutch company, which also owns the line from Delagoa Bay to Pretoria and from Pretoria to the frontier of the Free State. The Beira railway belongs to a company controlled by the British South Africa Company, and is virtually a part of that great undertaking.

All these railways, except the Beira line, have the same gauge, one of three feet six inches. The Beira line has a two-foot gauge, but is now (1899) being enlarged to the standard gauge. Throughout South Africa the lines of railway are laid on steeper gradients than is usual in Europe: one in forty is not uncommon, and on the Natal line it is sometimes one in thirty, though this is being gradually reduced. Although the accommodation at the minor stations is extremely simple, and sometimes even primitive, the railways are well managed, and the cars are arranged with a view to sleep on the night journeys; so that one can manage even the long transit from Cape Town to Pretoria with no great fatigue.

Considering how very thinly peopled the country is, so that there is practically no local pa.s.senger and very little local goods traffic, the railway service is much better than could have been expected, and does great credit to the enterprise of the people.

Railways have made an enormous difference, not to travel only, but to trade and to politics; for before the construction of the great trunk-line (which was not opened to Pretoria till 1892) the only means of conveyance was the ox-waggon. The ox-waggon needs a few words of description, for it is the most characteristic feature of South African travel. It is a long low structure, drawn by seven, eight, nine, or even ten yoke of oxen, and is surmounted (when intended to carry travellers) by a convex wooden frame and canvas roof. The animals are harnessed by a strong and heavy chain attached to the yoke which holds each pair together. The oxen usually accomplish about twelve miles a day, but can be made to do sixteen, or with pressure a little more. They walk very slowly, and they are allowed to rest and feed more hours than those during which they travel. The rest-time is usually the forenoon and till about four P.M. with another rest for part of the night. It was in these waggons that the Boers carried with them their wives and children and household goods in the great exodus of 1836. It was in such waggons that nearly all the explorations of South Africa have been made, such as those by the missionaries, and particularly by Robert Moffat and by Livingstone (in his earlier journeys), and such as those of the hunting pioneers, men like Anderson, Gordon-c.u.mming, and Selous. And to this day it is on the waggon that whoever traverses any unfrequented region must rely. Horses, and even mules, soon break down; and as the traveller must carry his food and other necessaries of camp life with him, he always needs the waggon as a basis of operations, even if he has a seasoned horse which he can use for two or three days when speed is required.

Waggons have, moreover, another value for a large party; they can be readily formed into a laager, or camp, by being drawn into a circle, with the oxen placed inside and so kept safe from the attacks of wild beasts. And where there are hostile Kafirs to be feared, such a laager is an efficient fortress, from within which a few determined marksmen have often successfully resisted the onslaught of hordes of natives. An immense trade has been carried on by means of ox-waggons between the points where the railways end and the new settlements in Matabililand and Mashonaland. When I pa.s.sed from Mafeking to Bulawayo in October, 1895, thousands of oxen were drawing hundreds of waggons along the track between those towns. When, a month later, I travelled from Fort Salisbury to Chimoyo, then the terminus of the Beira line, I pa.s.sed countless waggons standing idle along the track, because owing to the locusts and the drought which had destroyed most of the gra.s.s, the oxen had either died or grown too lean and feeble to be able to drag the loads. Hence the cattle-plague which in 1896 carried off the larger part of the transport-oxen was a terrible misfortune, not only to the natives who owned these animals, but also to the whole northern region, which largely depends upon cattle transport for its food, its comforts, its building materials, and its mine machinery.

It is the character of the country that has permitted the waggon to become so important a factor in South African exploration, politics, and commerce. The interior, though high, is not generally rugged. Much of it--indeed, all the eastern and northern parts--is a vast rolling plain, across which wheeled vehicles can pa.s.s with no greater difficulty than the beds of the streams, sometimes deeply cut through soft ground, present. The ranges of hills which occur here and there are generally traversed by pa.s.ses, which, though stony, are not steep enough to be impracticable. Over most of the southern half of the plateau there is no wood, and where forests occur the trees seldom grow thick together, and the brushwood is so dry and small that it can soon be cut away to make a pa.s.sage. Had South Africa been thickly wooded, like the eastern parts of North America or some parts of Australia, waggon-travelling would have been difficult or impossible; but most of it is, like the country between the Missouri River and the Great Salt Lake, a dry open country, where the waggon can be made a true s.h.i.+p of the desert. This explains the fact, so surprising to most European readers of African travel and adventure, that wherever man can walk or ride he can take his moving home with him.

For rapid transit, however, the traveller who has pa.s.sed beyond the railway is now not wholly dependent on the ox. Coaches, drawn sometimes by mules, sometimes by horses, run from some points on the railways to outlying settlements; they are, however, always uncomfortable and not always safe. They travel night and day, usually accomplis.h.i.+ng from six to eight miles an hour on good ground, but much less where the surface is sandy or rugged. In the north and north-east of Cape Colony and in the Transvaal, as well as in Matabililand, horses are very little used either for riding or for driving, owing to the prevalence of a disease called horse-sickness, which attacks nearly every animal, and from which only about a quarter recover. This is one reason why so little exploration has been done on horseback; and it is a point to be noted by those who desire to travel in the country, and who naturally think of the mode by which people used to make journeys in Europe, and by which they make journeys still in large parts of South and of North America, as well as in Western Asia.

I have spoken of the "tracks" used by waggons and coaches; the reader must not suppose that these tracks are roads. There are few made roads in South Africa, except in the neighbourhood of Cape Town, Durban, Maritzburg, Graham's Town, and one or two other towns. Those in Natal are among the best. Neither are there (except as aforesaid) any bridges, save here and there rude ones of logs thrown across a stream bed.

Elsewhere the track is merely a line across the veldt (prairie), marked and sometimes cut deep by the wheels of many waggons, where all that man has done has been to remove the trees or bushes. Here and there the edges of the steep stream banks have been cut down so as to allow a vehicle to descend more easily to the bottom, where during the rains the stream flows, and where during the rest of the year the ground is sandy or muddy. After heavy rain a stream is sometimes impa.s.sable for days together, and the waggons have to wait on the bank till the torrent subsides. At all times these water channels are troublesome, for the oxen or mules are apt to jib or get out of hand in descending the steep slope, and it is no easy matter to get them urged up the steep slope on the other side. Accidents often occur, and altogether it may be said that the _dongas_--this is the name given to these hollow stream channels--form the most exciting feature of South African travel (in places where wild beasts and natives are no longer dangerous) and afford the greatest scope for the skill of the South African driver.

Skilful he must be, for he never drives less than six span of oxen, and seldom less than three pairs of horses or mules (the Bulawayo coach had, in 1895, five pairs). It takes two men to drive. One wields an immensely long whip, while the other holds the reins. Both incessantly apostrophise the animals. It is chiefly with the whip that the team is driven; but if the team is one of mules, one of the two drivers is for a large part of the time on his feet, running alongside the beasts, beating them with a short whip and shouting to them by their names, with such adjectives, expletives, and other objurgations as he can command.

Many Dutchmen do drive wonderfully well.

I have said nothing of internal water travel by river or lake, because none exists. There are no lakes, and there is not a river with water enough to float the smallest steamboat, except some reaches of the Limpopo River in the wet season. The only steamer that plies anywhere on a river is that which ascends the Pungwe River from Beira to Fontesvilla; it goes only as far as the tide goes, and on most of its trips spends fully half its time sticking on the sand-banks with which the Pungwe abounds. So far as I know, no one has ever proposed to make a ca.n.a.l in any part of the country.

From what has been said it will be gathered that there is no country where railways are and will be more needed than South Africa. They are the chief need of the newly settled districts, and the best means, next to a wise and conciliatory administration, of preventing fresh native outbreaks. Unfortunately, they will for a great while have no local traffic, because most of the country they pa.s.s through has not one white inhabitant to the square mile. Their function is to connect the coast with the distant mining centres, in which population has begun to grow.

To lay them is, however, comparatively cheap work. Except in the immediate neighbourhood of a town, nothing has to be paid for the land.

The gradients all through the interior plateau are comparatively easy, and the engineers have in Africa cared less for making their ascents gentle than we do in older countries. Even in the hilly parts of the Transvaal and Matabililand the ranges are not high or steep, and one can turn a kopje instead of cutting or tunnelling through it. Few bridges are needed, because there are few rivers.

A word as to another point on which any one planning a tour to South Africa may be curious--the accommodation obtainable. Most travellers have given the inns a bad name. My own experience is scanty, for we were so often the recipient of private hospitality as to have occasion to sleep in an inn (apart from the "stores" of Bechua.n.a.land and Mashonaland, of which more hereafter) in four places only, Mafeking, Ladybrand, Durban, and Bloemfontein. But it seemed to us that, considering the newness of the country and the difficulty in many places of furnis.h.i.+ng a house well and of securing provisions, the entertainment was quite tolerable, sometimes much better than one had expected. In the two Colonies, and the chief places of the two Republics, clean beds and enough to eat can always be had; in the largest places there is nothing to complain of, though the prices are sometimes high. Luxuries are unprocurable, but no sensible man will go to a new country expecting luxuries.

[Footnote 38: At the time of my visit it went no further than Mafeking.]

[Footnote 39: There is also a line of railway from Port Elizabeth to Graaf-Reinet, some short branch lines near Cape Town, and a small line from Graham's Town to the coast at Port Alfred.]

CHAPTER XIV

FROM CAPE TOWN TO BULAWAYO

In this and the four following chapters I propose to give some account of the country through which the traveller pa.s.ses on his way from the coast to the points which are the natural goals of a South African journey, Kimberley and Johannesburg, Bulawayo and Fort Salisbury, hoping thereby to convey a more lively impression of the aspects of the land and its inhabitants than general descriptions can give, and incidentally to find opportunities for touching upon some of the questions on which the future of the country will turn.

First, a few words about the voyage. You can go to South Africa either by one of the great British lines across the Atlantic to the ports of Cape Colony and Natal, or by the German line through the Red Sea and along the East African coast to Beira or Delagoa Bay. The steamers of the German line take thirty days from Port Said to Beira, and two days more to Delagoa Bay. They are good boats, though much smaller than those of the two chief English lines to the Cape (the Castle and the Union), and the voyage from Port Said has the advantage of being, at most times of the year, a smooth one pretty nearly the whole way. They touch at Aden, Zanzibar, Dar-es-Salaam, and Quilimane, and give an opportunity of seeing those places. But all along the East African coast the heat is excessive--a damp, depressing heat. And the whole time required to reach Beira from England, even if one travels by rail from Calais to Ma.r.s.eilles, Brindisi, or Naples, and takes a British steamer thence to Port Said, joining the German boat at the latter port, is more than five weeks. Nearly everybody, therefore, chooses the Atlantic route from Southampton or London to the Cape. The Atlantic voyage, which lasts from sixteen to twenty days, is, on the whole, a pleasant and healthful one.

The steamers, both those of the Castle Line and those of the Union Line--and the same may be said for the New Zealand Line and the Aberdeen Line which plies to Australia, both of these touching at the Cape--are comfortable and well appointed, and I cannot imagine any navigation more scrupulously careful than that which I saw on board the _Hawarden Castle_, by which I went out and returned. During the winter and spring months there is often pretty rough weather from England as far as Madeira. But from that island onward, or at any rate from the Canaries onward, one has usually a fairly smooth sea with moderate breezes till within two or three days of Cape Town, when head winds are frequently encountered. Nor is the heat excessive. Except during the two days between Cape Verde and the equator, it is never more than what one can enjoy during the day and tolerate during the night. One sees land only at Madeira, where the steamer coals for a few hours; at the picturesque Canary Islands, between which she pa.s.ses, gaining, if the weather be clear, a superb view of the magnificent Peak of Teneriffe; and at Cape Verde, where she runs (in the daytime) within a few miles of the African coast. Those who enjoy the colours of the sea and of the sea skies, and to whom the absence of letters, telegrams, and newspapers is welcome, will find few more agreeable ways of pa.s.sing a fortnight. After Cape Finisterre very few vessels are seen. After Madeira every night reveals new stars rising from the ocean as our own begin to vanish.

Tutte le stolle gia dell' altro polo Vedea la notte, e il nostro tanto ba.s.so Che non sorgeva fuor del marin suolo,[40]

as Ulysses says, in Dante's poem, of his voyage to the southern hemisphere. The pleasure of watching unfamiliar constellations rise from the east and sweep across the sky, is a keen one, which often kept us late from sleep.

For a few hours only before reaching Cape Town does one discern on the eastern horizon the stern grey mountains that rise along the barren coast. A n.o.bler site for a city and a naval stronghold than that of the capital of South Africa can hardly be imagined. It rivals Gibraltar and Constantinople, Bombay and San Francisco. Immediately behind the town, which lies along the sea, the majestic ma.s.s of Table Mountain rises to a height of 3600 feet, a steep and partly wooded slope capped by a long line of sheer sandstone precipices more than 1000 feet high, and flanked to right and left by bold, isolated peaks. The beautiful sweep of the bay in front, the towering crags behind, and the romantic pinnacles which rise on either side, make a landscape that no one who has seen it can forget. The town itself is disappointing. It has preserved very little of its old Dutch character. The miniature ca.n.a.ls which once traversed it are gone. The streets, except two, are rather narrow, and bordered by low houses; nor is there much to admire in the buildings, except the handsome Parliament House, the new post office, and the offices of the Standard Bank. The immediate suburbs, inhabited chiefly by Malays and other coloured people, are mean. But the neighbourhood is extremely attractive. To the north-west Table Mountain and its spurs descend steeply to the sea, and the road which runs along the beach past the village of Sea Point offers a long series of striking views of sh.o.r.e and crag. It is on the east, however, that the most beautiful spots lie.

Five miles from Cape Town and connected with it by railway, the village of Rondebosch nestles under the angle of Table Mountain, and a mile farther along the line is the little town of Wynberg. Round these places, or between them and Cape Town, nearly all the richer, and a great many even of the poorer, white people of Cape Town live. The roads are bordered by pretty villas, whose grounds, concealed by no walls, are filled with magnolias and other flowering trees and shrubs. Avenues of tall pines or of superb oaks, planted by the Dutch in the last century, run here and there along the by-roads. Immediately above, the grey precipices of Table Mountain tower into the air, while in the opposite direction a break in the woods shows in the far distance the sharp summits, snow-tipped during the winter months, of the lofty range of the Hottentots Holland Mountains. It would be hard to find anywhere, even in Italy or the Pyrenees, more exquisite combinations of soft and cultivated landscape with grand mountain forms than this part of the Cape peninsula presents. Perhaps the most charming nook of all is where the quaint old Dutch farmhouse of Groot Constantia[41] stands among its vineyards, about ten miles from Cape Town. Behind it is the range which connects the hills of Simon's Bay with Table Mountain; its declivities are at this point covered with the graceful silver-tree, whose glistening foliage s.h.i.+nes brighter than that of the European olive.

Beneath the farmhouse are the vineyards which produce the famous sweet wine that bears the name of Constantia, sloping gently towards the waters of False Bay, whose farther side is guarded by a wall of frowning peaks, while the deep blue misty ocean opens in the distance.

It is a landscape unlike anything one can see in Europe, and though the light in sea and sky is brilliant, the brilliance is on this coast soft and mellow, unlike the clear sharp radiance of the arid interior.

No one who cares for natural scenery quits Cape Town without ascending Table Mountain, whose summit affords not only a very beautiful and extensive prospect over the surrounding country, but a striking ocean view. Looking down the narrow gullies that descend from the top, one sees the intensely blue sea closing them below, framed between their jutting crags, while on the other side the busy streets and wharves of Cape Town lie directly under the eye, and one can discover the vehicles in the streets and the trees in the Governor's garden. The heaths and other flowers and shrubs that grow profusely over the wide top, which is not flat, as he who looks at it from the sea fancies, but cut up by glens, with here and there lake reservoirs in the hollows, are very lovely, and give a novel and peculiar charm to this ascent.[42] Nor is the excursion to Cape Point, the real Cape of Storms of Bartholomew Diaz, and the Cape of Good Hope of Vasco da Gama, less beautiful. An hour in the railway brings one to Simon's Bay, the station of the British naval squadron, a small but fairly well sheltered inlet under high hills. From this one drives for four hours over a very rough track through a lonely and silent country, sometimes sandy, sometimes thick with brushwood, but everywhere decked with brilliant flowers, to the Cape, a magnificent headland rising almost vertically from the ocean to a height of 800 feet. Long, heavy surges are always foaming on the rocks below and nowhere, even on this troubled coast, where the hot Mozambique current meets a stream of cold Antarctic water, do gales more often howl and shriek than round these rocky pinnacles. One can well understand the terror with which the Portuguese sailors five centuries ago used to see the grim headland loom up through the clouds driven by the strong south-easters, that kept them struggling for days or weeks to round the cape that marked their way to India. But Sir Francis Drake, who pa.s.sed it coming home westward from his ever-famous voyage round the world, had a more auspicious experience: "We ran hard aboard the Cape, finding the report of the Portuguese to be most false, who affirm that it is the most dangerous cape of the world, never without intolerable storms and present danger to travellers who come near the same. This cape is a most stately thing, and the finest cape we saw in the whole circ.u.mference of the earth."

A third excursion, which well repays the traveller, is to the quaint little town of Stellenbosch, founded by Adrian van der Stel (Governor of the Colony) in 1680, and called after himself and his wife, whose name was Bosch. It is built in genuine Dutch style, with straight streets of two-storied white houses, the windows nearly flush with the walls as in Holland, the wood-work and the green shutters those of Holland, and long lines of dark-green oaks shading the foot-walks on each side the street.

Soft, rich pastures all round--for there is plenty of water brought down from the hills--complete the resemblance to a Hobbema landscape; and it is only when one looks up and sees rocky mountains soaring behind into the sky that the illusion is broken. It is here, and in the town of Swellendam, farther east, and in some of the villages that lie northward of Stellenbosch in the western province, that the Dutch element has remained strongest and has best retained its ancient ways and customs.

We have, however, delayed long enough round the capital, and it is time to plunge into the interior by the railway. Sixty miles to the north of Cape Town, the trunk-line, which has threaded its way through the valleys of an outlying range of mountains, reaches the foot of the great inner table-land at a place called Hex River, and in an hour climbs by zigzags up an incline which is in some places as steep as one in thirty-five, mounting 1600 feet into a desert land. Rugged brown mountains, sometimes craggy, sometimes covered with ma.s.ses of loose stone, rise above the lower ground, now a valley, now an open plain, through which the railway takes its eastward way. The bushes, which had been tall and covered with blossoms on the ascent, are now stunted, bearing small and usually withered flowers. Hardly an herb, and not a blade of gra.s.s, is to be seen on the ground, which is sometimes of clay, baked hard by the sun, sometimes of sand, without a drop of water anywhere. Yet water flows when, now and then in the summer, a storm breaks, or a few showers come; and then nature revives, and for a week or two flowers spring from the soil and a fresher green comes upon the bushes. In a landscape so arid one hears with surprise that the land is worth ten s.h.i.+llings an acre for one or two of the smallest shrubs give feed for sheep, and there are wells scattered about sufficient for the flocks. The farms are large, usually of at least six thousand acres, so one seldom sees a farmhouse. The farmers are all of Boer stock. They lead a lonely life in a silent and melancholy nature, but their habitual gravity has not made them unsocial, for they are fond of riding or driving in their waggons to visit one another on all occasions of festivity or mourning. Every ten or fifteen miles there is a station, and here the British element in the population appears, chiefly occupied in store-keeping. At Matjesfontein one finds an hotel and a number of small villas built to serve as a health resort. Wells surrounded by Australian gums planted for shade, make a little oasis in the desert.

Farther east the village of Beaufort West, the only place along the line that aspires to be called a town, boasts a church with a spire, and has one or two streets, though most of its houses are stuck down irregularly over a surface covered with broken bottles and empty sardine and preserved meat tins. Here, too, there is a large, shallow pond of water, and here people with weak lungs come to breathe the keen, dry, invigorating air. Of its efficacy there is no doubt, but one would think that the want of society and of variety would be almost as depressing as the air is stimulating. The prospects have a certain beauty, for beyond the wide, bare, greyish-brown plain to the south sharp mountains stand up, which take at sunrise and sunset delightful tints of blue and purple, and the sense of a vast expanse on earth beneath and in heaven above has something strange and solemn. But the monotony of perpetual sunlight upon a landscape which has no foregrounds and never changes, save in colour, must be trying to those who have no occupation except that of getting well.

This Karroo scenery continues, with little variation, for hundreds of miles. To the north of the railway, which runs mostly from west to east, the aspect of the country is much the same, dry, stony, and forbidding, for full three hundred miles to the Orange River, and beyond that into Namaqualand. Except for the few houses at some of the stations, it seems a wilderness; yet here and there stand tiny villages, connected by lines of coach with the railway, whither the neighbouring farmers come to supply their household needs. But as the train moves farther and farther eastward the features of nature grow less austere. The mountains by degrees recede or sink; the country becomes more of an open plain, though with isolated hills visible here and there over its expanse. It is also slightly greener, and after the rains some little gra.s.s springs up, besides the low, succulent shrub which the sheep eat. At De Aar Junction, five hundred miles from Cape Town, the line to Bloemfontein and the Transvaal branches off to the right. We follow the western branch over a vast slightly undulating plain to the Orange River, here a perennial stream, and at six hundred and forty-six miles from Cape Town find ourselves once more in the haunts of men at Kimberley.

Kimberley, the city of diamonds, has had a curious history. In 1869-70 the precious crystals, first found in 1867 near the Orange River, were discovered here in considerable quant.i.ty. A sudden rush of adventurers from all parts of South Africa, as well as from Europe, gave it in three or four years a population of many thousands. The mining claims were then and for some years afterwards in the hands of a large number of persons and companies who had opened them or purchased them. The compet.i.tion of these independent miner-workers was bringing down the price of the stones, and the waste or leakage arising from the theft of stones by the native work-people, who sold them to European I.D.B.

(illicit diamond-buyers), seriously reduced the profits of mining. It was soon seen that the consolidation of the various concerns would effect enormous savings and form the only means of keeping up the price of diamonds. The process of amalgamating the claims and interests and merging them in one huge corporation was completed in 1885, chiefly by the skill and boldness of Mr. Cecil J. Rhodes, who had gone to Natal for his health shortly before 1870, and came up to Kimberley in the first months of the rush. Since the amalgamation, the great corporation called the De Beers Consolidated Mining Company (which now owns nearly all the mines), has reduced the output of diamonds to just such an annual amount as experience has proved that Europe and America--the United States is the chief market--are able to take at a price high enough to leave a large profit. By this means the price has been well maintained. This policy, however, has incidentally reduced the population of Kimberley.

One powerful corporation, with its comparatively small staff of employees, has taken the place of the crowd of independent adventurers of the old days, and some of the mines have been closed because the rest are sufficient to produce as many diamonds as it is deemed prudent to put upon the market. Thus there are now only about 10,000 people in the town, and some of the poorer quarters are almost deserted, the stores and taverns, as well as the shanty dwellings, empty and falling to pieces. In the better quarters, however, the old roughness has been replaced by order and comfort. Many of the best villas are embowered in groves of tall Australian gum-trees, while the streets and roads are bordered either by gum-trees or by hedges of p.r.i.c.kly-pear or agave. The streets are wide, and most of the houses are detached and of one story, built like Indian bungalows; so the town covers an area quite disproportionate to its population, and gives the impression of an extensive city. For the residence of the Europeans employed in the two great mines which the Company works, a suburb called Kenilworth has been built by Mr. Rhodes, where neat houses of four, five, or six rooms each stand in handsome avenues planted with Australian trees, the so-called "beefwood" and the red gum. They are not beautiful trees, but they have the merit of growing very fast, and any shade is welcome.

The diamonds are found in beds of clay, of which there are two: a yellow and softish clay, lying on or near the surface, and a hard blue clay, lying deeper. These clays, which are usually covered by a thin layer of calcareous rock, are supposed to be the remains of mud-pits due to volcanic action, such as the so-called mud-volcanoes of Iceland, near Namaskard, on the banks of Lake Myvatn, or such as the similar boiling mud-pits of the Yellowstone Park country, called from their brilliant colours the "Paint-pots." It is, at any rate, from circular clay basins, inclosed within a harder rock (basalt, black shale, and quartzite) that the stones are obtained. Some of the mines are worked even to a depth of 1200 feet by shafts and subterranean galleries. Some are open, and these, particularly that called the Wesselton Mine, are an interesting sight. This deep hollow, one-third of a mile in circ.u.mference and 100 feet deep, inclosed by a strong fence of barbed wire, is filled by a swarm of active Kafir workmen, cleaving the "hard blue" with pickaxes, piling it up on barrows, and carrying it off to the wide fields; where it is left exposed to the sun, and, during three months, to the rain.

Having been thus subjected to a natural decomposition, it is the more readily brought by the pickaxe into smaller fragments before being sent to the mills, where it is crushed, pulverized, and finally washed to get at the stones. Nowhere in the world does the hidden wealth of the soil and the element of chance in its discovery strike one so forcibly as here, where you are shown a piece of ground a few acres in extent, and are told, "Out of this pit diamonds of the value of 12,000,000 have been taken." Twenty-six years ago the ground might have been bought for 50.

The most striking sight at Kimberley, and one unique in the world, is furnished by the two so-called "compounds" in which the natives who work in the mines are housed and confined. They are huge inclosures, unroofed, but covered with a wire netting to prevent anything from being thrown out of them over the walls, and with a subterranean entrance to the adjoining mine. The mine is worked on the system of three eight-hour s.h.i.+fts, so that the workman is never more than eight hours together underground. Round the interior of the wall there are built sheds or huts, in which the natives live and sleep when not working. A hospital is also provided within the inclosure, as well as a school where the work-people can spend their leisure in learning to read and write. No spirits are sold--an example of removing temptation from the native which it is to be wished that the legislature of Cape Colony would follow. Every entrance is strictly guarded, and no visitors, white or native, are permitted, all supplies being obtained from the store within, kept by the Company. The De Beers mine compound contained at the time of my visit 2600 natives, belonging to a great variety of tribes, so that here one could see specimens of the different native types, from Natal and Pondoland on the south, to the sh.o.r.es of Lake Tanganyika in the far north. They come from every quarter, attracted by the high wages, usually eighteen to thirty s.h.i.+llings a week, and remain for three months or more and occasionally even for long periods, knowing, of course, that they have to submit to the precautions which are absolutely needed to prevent them from appropriating the diamonds they may happen to find in the course of their work. To encourage honesty, ten per cent, of the value of any stone which a workman may find is given to him if he brings it himself to the overseer, and the value of the stones on which this ten per cent, is paid is estimated at 400,000 in each year.

Nevertheless, a certain number of thefts occur. I heard from a missionary an anecdote of a Basuto who, after his return from Kimberley, was describing how, on one occasion, his eye fell on a valuable diamond in the clay he was breaking into fragments. While he was endeavouring to pick it up he perceived the overseer approaching, and, having it by this time in his hand, was for a moment terribly frightened, the punishment for theft being very severe. The overseer, however, pa.s.sed on. "And then," said the Basuto, "I knew that there was indeed a G.o.d, for He had preserved me."

When the native has earned the sum he wants--and his earnings acc.u.mulate quickly, since he can live upon very little--he takes his wages in English sovereigns, a coin now current through all Africa as far as Tanganyika, goes home to his own tribe, perhaps a month's or six weeks'

journey distant, buys two oxen, buys with them a wife, and lives happily, or at least lazily, ever after. Here in the vast oblong compound one sees Zulus from Natal, Fingos, Pondos, Tembus, Basutos, Bechuanas, Gungunhana's subjects from the Portuguese territories, some few Matabili and Makalaka, and plenty of Zambesi boys from the tribes on both sides of that great river--a living ethnological collection such as can be examined nowhere else in South Africa. Even Bushmen, or at least natives with some Bushman blood in them, are not wanting. They live peaceably together, and amuse themselves in their several ways during their leisure hours. Besides games of chance we saw a game resembling "fox and geese," played with pebbles on a board; and music was being discoursed on two rude native instruments, the so-called "Kafir piano,"

made of pieces of iron of unequal length fastened side by side in a frame, and a still ruder contrivance of hard bits of wood, also of unequal size, which when struck by a stick emit different notes, the first beginnings of a tune. A very few were reading or writing letters, the rest busy with their cooking or talking to one another. Some tribes are incessant talkers, and in this strange mixing-pot of black men one may hear a dozen languages spoken as one pa.s.ses from group to group.

The climate of Kimberley is healthy, and even bracing, though not pleasant when a north-west wind from the Kalahari Desert fills the air with sand and dust. Its dryness recommends it as a resort for consumptive patients, while the existence of a cultivated, though small, society, makes it a less doleful place of residence than are the sanatoria of the Karroo. The country round is, however, far from attractive. Save on the east, where there rises a line of hills just high enough to catch the lovely lights of evening and give colour and variety to the landscape, the prospect is monotonous in every direction.

Like the ocean, this vast plain is so flat that you cannot see how vast it is. Except in the environs of the town, it is unbroken by tree or house, and in a part of those environs the ma.s.ses of bluish-grey mine refuse that strew the ground give a dismal and even squalid air to the foreground of the view. One is reminded of the deserted coal-pits that surround Wigan, or the burnt-out and waste parts of the Black Country in South Staffords.h.i.+re, though at Kimberley there is, happily, no coal-smoke or sulphurous fumes in the air, no cinder on the surface, no coal-dust to thicken the mud and blacken the roads. Some squalor one must have with that disturbance of nature which mining involves, but here the enlightened activity of the Company and the settlers has done its best to mitigate these evils by the planting of trees and orchards, by the taste which many of the private houses show, and by the provision here and there of open s.p.a.ces for games.

From Kimberley the newly-opened railway runs one hundred and fifty miles farther north to Vryburg, till lately the capital of the Crown Colony of British Bechua.n.a.land, annexed in 1895 to Cape Colony, and thence to Mafeking. After a few miles the line crosses the Vaal River, here a respectable stream for South Africa, since it has, even in the dry season, more water than the Cam at Cambridge, or the Cherwell at Oxford--perhaps as much as the Arno at Florence. It flows in a wide, rocky bed, about thirty feet below the level of the adjoining country.

The country becomes more undulating as the line approaches the frontiers, first of the Orange Free State, and then of the Transvaal Republic, which bounds that State on the north. Bushes are seen, and presently trees, nearly all p.r.i.c.kly mimosas, small and unattractive, but a pleasant relief from the bare flats of Kimberley, whence all the wood that formerly grew there has been taken for mine props and for fuel.

There is more gra.s.s, too, and presently patches of cultivated land appear, where Kafirs grow maize, called in South Africa "mealies." Near the village of Taungs[43] a large native reservation is pa.s.sed, where part of the Batlapin tribe is settled, and here a good deal of ground is tilled, though in September, when no crop is visible, one scarcely notices the fields, since they are entirely unenclosed, mere strips on the veldt, a little browner than the rest, and with fewer shrublets on them. But the landscape remains equally featureless and monotonous, redeemed only, as evening falls, by the tints of purple and violet which glow upon the low ridges or swells of ground that rise in the distance.

Vryburg is a cheerful little place of brick walls and corrugated-iron roofs; Mafeking another such, still smaller and, being newer, with a still larger proportion of shanties to houses. At Mafeking the railway ended in 1895. It has since been opened all the way to Bulawayo. Here ends also the territory of Cape Colony, the rest of Bechua.n.a.land to the north and west forming the so-called Bechua.n.a.land Protectorate, which in October, 1895, was handed over by the Colonial Office, subject to certain restrictions and provisions for the benefit of the natives, to the British South Africa Company, within the sphere of whose operations it had, by the charter of 1890, been included. After the invasion of the Transvaal Republic by the expedition led by Dr. Jameson, which started from Pitsani, a few miles north of Mafeking, in December, 1895, this transfer was recalled, and Bechua.n.a.land is now again under the direct control of the High Commissioner for South Africa as representing the British Crown. It is administered by magistrates, who have a force of police at their command, and by native chiefs, the most powerful and famous of whom is Khama.

Close to Mafeking itself there was living a chieftain whose long career is interwoven with many of the wars and raids that went on between the Boers and the natives from 1840 to 1885--Montsioa (p.r.o.nounced "Montsiwa"), the head of a tribe of Barolongs. We were taken to see him, and found him sitting on a low chair under a tree in the midst of his huge native village, dressed in a red flannel s.h.i.+rt, a pair of corduroy trousers, and a broad grey felt hat with a jackal's tail stuck in it for ornament. His short woolly hair was white, and his chocolate-coloured skin, hard and tough like that of a rhinoceros, was covered with a fretwork of tiny wrinkles, such as one seldom sees on a European face.

He was proud of his great age (eighty-five), and recalled the names of several British governors and generals during the last seventy years.

But his chief interest was in inquiries (through his interpreter) regarding the Queen and events in England, and he amused his visitors by the diplomatic shrewdness with which, on being told that there had been a change of government in England, and a majority in favour of the new government, he observed "They have made a mistake; they could not have had a better government than the old one." He was a wealthy man, owning an immense number of the oxen which then carried on (for the cattle plague soon after destroyed most of them) the transport service between Mafeking and Bulawayo; and, from all I could learn, he ruled his people well, following the counsels of the British government, which in 1885 delivered him out of the hands of the Boers. He died in the middle of 1896.

At Mafeking we bade farewell to the railway, and prepared to plunge into the wilderness. We travelled in a light American waggon, having a Cape Dutchman as driver and a coloured "Cape boy" to help him, but no other attendants. The waggon had a small iron tank, which we filled with water that had been boiled to kill noxious germs, and with this we made our soup and tea. For provisions we carried biscuits, a little tinned soup and meat, and a few bottles of soda-water. These last proved to be the most useful part of our stores, for we found the stream-or well-water along the route undrinkable, and our mouths were often so parched that it was only by the help of sips of soda-water that we could manage to swallow the dry food. At the European stores which occur along the road, usually at intervals of thirty or forty miles, though sometimes there is none for sixty miles or more, we could often procure eggs and sometimes a lean chicken; so there was enough to support life, though seldom did we get what is called in America "a square meal."

Northward from Mafeking the country grows pretty. At first there are trees scattered picturesquely over the undulating pastures and sometimes forming woods--dry and open woods, yet welcome after the bareness which one has left behind. Here we pa.s.sed the tiny group of houses called Pitsani, little dreaming that three months later it would become famous as the place where the Matabililand police were marshalled, and from which they started on their ill-starred march into the Transvaal, whose bare and forbidding hills we saw a few miles away to the east. Presently the ground becomes rougher, and the track winds among and under a succession of abrupt kopjes (p.r.o.nounced "koppies"), mostly of granitic or gneissose rock. One is surprised that a heavy coach, and still heavier waggons, can so easily traverse such a country, for the road is only a track, for which art has done nothing save in cutting a way through the trees. It is one of the curious features of South Africa that the rocky hills have an unusual faculty for standing detached enough from one another to allow wheeled vehicles to pa.s.s between them, and the country is so dry that mora.s.ses, the obstacle which a driver chiefly fears in most countries, are here, for three-fourths of the year, not feared at all. This region of bold, craggy hills, spa.r.s.ely wooded, usually rising only some few hundred feet out of the plateau itself, which is about 4000 feet above the sea, continues for about thirty miles. To it there succeeds a long stretch of flat land along the banks of the sluggish Notwani, the only perennial river of these parts; for the stream which on the map bears the name of Molopo, and runs away west into the desert to lose nearly all of its water in the sands, is in September dry, and one crosses its channel without noticing it. This Notwani, whose course is marked by a line of trees taller and greener than the rest, is at this season no better than a feeble brook, flowing slowly, with more mud than water. But it contains not only good-sized fish, the catching of which is the chief holiday diversion of these parts, but also crocodiles, which, generally dormant during the season of low water, are apt to obtrude themselves when they are least expected, and would make bathing dangerous, were there any temptation to bathe in such a thick green fluid. That men as well as cattle should drink it seems surprising, yet they do,--Europeans as well as natives,--and apparently with no bad effects. Below Palla, one hundred and ninety-five miles north of Mafeking, the Notwani joins the Limpopo, or Crocodile River, a much larger stream, which has come down from the Transvaal hills, and winds for nearly a thousand miles to the north and east before it falls into the Indian Ocean. It is here nearly as wide as the Thames at Henley, fordable in some places, and flowing very gently.

The country all along this part of the road is perfectly flat, and just after the wet season very feverish, but it may be traversed with impunity from the end of May till December. It is a dull region--everywhere the same thin wood, through which one can see for about a quarter of a mile in every direction, consisting of two or three kinds of mimosa, all th.o.r.n.y, and all so spare and starved in their leaf.a.ge that one gets little shade beneath them when at the midday halt shelter has to be sought from the formidable sun. On the parched ground there is an undergrowth of p.r.i.c.kly shrubs, among which it is necessary to move with as much care as is needed in climbing a barbed-wire fence.

When at night, camping out on the veldt, one gathers brushwood to light the cooking-fire, both the clothes and the hands of the novice come badly off. Huge ant-hills begin to appear, sometimes fifteen to twenty feet high and as many yards in circ.u.mference; but these large ones are all dead and may be of considerable age. In some places they are so high and steep, and stand so close together, that by joining them with an earthen rampart a strong fort might be made. When people begin to till the ground more largely than the natives now do, the soil heaped up in these great mounds will be found most serviceable. It consists of good mould, very friable, and when spread out over the service ought to prove fertile. In pulverizing the soil, the ants render here much the same kind of service which the earthworms do in Europe. There are no flowers at this season (end of September), and very little gra.s.s; yet men say that there is no better ranching country in all South Africa, and the oxen which one meets all the way, feeding round the spots where the transport-waggons have halted, evidently manage to pick up enough herbage to support them. The number of ox-waggons is surprising in so lonely a country, till one remembers that most of the food and drink, as well as of the furniture, agricultural and mining tools, and wood for building,--indeed, most of the necessaries and all the luxuries of life needed in Matabililand,--have to be sent up along this road, which is more used than the alternative route through the Transvaal from Pretoria _via_ Pietersburg. No wonder all sorts of articles are costly in Bulawayo, when it has taken eight or ten weeks to bring them from the nearest railway terminus. The waggons do most of their journeying by night, allowing the oxen to rest during the heat of the day. One of the minor troubles of travel is the delay which ensues when one's vehicle meets a string of waggons, sometimes nearly a quarter of a mile long, for each has eight, nine, or even ten, span of oxen. They move very slowly, and at night, when the track happens to be a narrow one among trees, it is not easy to get past. Except for these waggons the road is lonely. One sees few natives, though the narrow footpaths crossing the wheel-track show that the country is inhabited. Here and there one pa.s.ses a large native village, such as Ramoutsie and Machudi, but small hamlets are rare, and solitary huts still rarer. The country is of course very thinly peopled in proportion to its resources, for, what with the good pasture nearly everywhere and the fertile land in many places, it could support eight or ten times the number of Barolongs, Bamangwato, and other Bechuanas who now live scattered over its vast area. It is not the beasts of prey that are to blame for this, for, with the disappearance of game, lions have become extremely scarce, and leopards and lynxes are no longer common. Few quadrupeds are seen, and not many kinds of birds. Vultures, hawks, and a species something like a magpie, with four pretty white patches upon the wings and a long tail, are the commonest, together with bluish-grey guinea-fowl, pigeons and sometimes a small partridge. In some parts there are plenty of bustards, prized as dainties, but we saw very few. Away from the track some buck of the commoner kinds may still be found, and farther to the west there is still plenty of big game in the Kalahari Desert. But the region which we traversed is almost as unattractive to the sportsman as it is to the lover of beauty. It is, indeed, one of the dullest parts of South Africa.

The next stage in the journey is marked by Palapshwye, Khama's capital.

This is the largest native town south of the Zambesi, for it has a population estimated at over 20,000. It came into being only a few years ago, when Khama, having returned from the exile to which his father had consigned him on account of his steadfast adherence to Christianity, and having succeeded to the chieftains.h.i.+p of the Bamangwato, moved the tribe from its previous dwelling-place at Shoshong, some seventy miles to the south-west, and fixed it here. Such migrations and foundations of new towns are not uncommon in South Africa, as they were not uncommon in India in the days of the Pathan and Mogul sovereigns, when each new occupant of the throne generally chose a new residence to fortify or adorn. Why this particular site was chosen I do not know. It stands high, and is free from malaria, and there are springs of water in the craggy hill behind; but the country all round is poor, rocky in some places, sandy in others, and less attractive than some other parts of Bechua.n.a.land. We entered the town late at night, delayed by the deep sand on the track, and wandered about in the dark for a long while before, after knocking at one hut after another, we could persuade any native to come out and show us the way to the little cl.u.s.ter of European dwellings. The Kafirs are terribly afraid of the night, and fear the ghosts, which are to them the powers of darkness, more than they care for offers of money.

Khama was absent in England, pressing upon the Colonial Office his objections to the demand made by the British South Africa Company that his kingdom should be brought within the scope of their administration and a railway constructed through it from Mafeking to Bulawayo. Besides the natural wish of a monarch to retain his authority undiminished, he was moved by the desire to keep his subjects from the use of intoxicating spirits, a practice which the establishment of white men among them would make it difficult, if not impossible, to prevent. The main object of Khama's life and rule has been to keep his people from intoxicants. His feelings were expressed in a letter to a British Commissioner, in which he said: "I fear Lo Bengula less than I fear brandy. I fought against Lo Bengula and drove him back. He never gives me a sleepless night. But to fight against drink is to fight against demons and not men. I fear the white man's drink more than the a.s.sagais of the Matabili, which kill men's bodies. Drink puts devils into men and destroys their souls and bodies." Though a Christian himself, and giving the missionaries in his dominions every facility for their work, he has never attempted to make converts by force. A prohibition of the use of alcohol, however, has seemed to him to lie "within the sphere of governmental action," and he has, indeed, imperilled his throne by efforts to prevent the Bamangwato from making and drinking the stronger kind of Kafir beer, to which, like all natives, they were much addicted.[44] This beer is made from the so-called "Kafir-corn" (a grain resembling millet, commonly cultivated by the natives), and, though less strong than European-made spirits, is more intoxicating than German or even English ale. Khama's prohibition of it had, shortly before my visit, led to a revolt and threatened secession of a part of the tribe under his younger brother, Radiclani, and the royal reformer, (himself a strict total abstainer), had been compelled to give way, lamenting, in a pathetic speech, that his subjects would not suffer him to do what was best for them. Just about the same time, in England, the proposal of a measure to check the use of intoxicating liquors led to the overthrow of a great party and clouded the prospects of any temperance legislation.

Alike in Britain and in Bechua.n.a.land it is no light matter to interfere with a people's favourite indulgences. European spirits are, however, so much more deleterious than Kafir beer that Khama still fought hard against their introduction. The British South Africa Company forbids the sale of intoxicants to natives in its territory, but Khama naturally felt that when at railway stations and stores spirits were being freely consumed by whites, the difficulty of keeping them from natives would be largely increased. The Colonial Office gave leave for the construction of the railway, and brought Khama into closer relations with the Company, while securing to him a large reserve and establis.h.i.+ng certain provisions for his benefit and that of his people. However, a few months later (in the beginning of 1896) the extension of the Company's powers as to Bechua.n.a.land was recalled, and Khama is now under the direct protection of the Imperial Government.