CHAPTER VI

CLIMATE AND KAFFIRS

T°

O be perfectly happy in November anywhere between the Cape and the Zambesi, the traveller should take a fig-leaf for a daytime costume, and a Laplander's suit of furs for the night.

I take off all that the law allows every day, and then gasp in the shade of my tent, but at night I do myself up in a lambswool wrapper, two ordinary blankets, and a steamer rug, and lie down to listen to the rattle of my teeth, until the sun begins to blaze through the canvas at daybreak. We who are at the headquarters at De Aar are having what the tradesmen would call a choice line of selected weather, every known kind coming in each twenty-four hours, and all served to us in wholesale lots.

Often half a dozen sorts and degrees get mixed

up. At such times we have a blistering sunshine with an Antarctic breeze blowing through it. Then on the top of that comes a Sudanese sandstorm made up of whirls that obscure the sun, and play the mischief with the camp, lifting up the skirts of the tents, and coating everything red.

In one of these whirls you can lay a clean white handkerchief between two overcoats, and when you take it out it will look as if it had been soaked in beef-tea. After the dust whirl comes a tropical thunder shower, at the end of which the sun sets with a splendour no painter would dare try to put on canvas. As for the effect of the climate on man, it is not fair to say it is healthy, and let it go at that. If I may judge from this part of Cape Colony in November, it actually beats Colorado, in the United States.

To go to Colorado you must be a millionaire with only one lung, and you must keep your lung, and part with your million. But here the rule is to come penniless, with no lungs. Thus established, you develop new lungs, and become a millionaire. All the African millionaires started with neither money nor respiratory organs, and are now the most energetic, able-bodied men of business alive. Paul Kruger is an exception. He

is having bad luck. sound lungs.

But he began unfairly with

But he began

We are on the edge of the Karroo Desert. It is a tract which looks like a rubbish-shooting ground of imperial size. It is everywhere rolling, and framed by great hills, except where the billows of baked and stony earth take the form of kopjes, (called "coppies"), or small hills. The entire country is about equally spotted with small stones and little dry tufts of vegetation, mainly sage brush. These are so bare and dry that they look like roots. The barren watercourses torture little trees to grow beside them, and these also are so bare and brown that they might as well be turned bottom upward.

In every direction the view is unobstructed for miles, yet you see nothing but the same burnt desert with the hot air dancing over it. There are occasional little herds of goats tended by native children, but they never show until you are close upon them. The Karroo might well be a heaven for snakes, lizards, and beetles, but I saw nonenor any living thing except a few goats, a few stately ostriches, a few Kaffirs in rags or blankets, and one small black-and-white bird that would pass for an undersized magpie at home. Silence,

solitude, desolation-multiply these a million-fold, you have the Karroo.

and

It is not without beauty, and it is not without a future. Everywhere, in everything, its colours are wondrous. Close at hand the hills are almost brick-red, a little farther away others are dovecoloured, while the farthest ones are of varying shades of purple. Tufts and splotches of vivid green appear wherever there is or has recently been water, and even the stones and shrubs are full of colour.

I have said that the ground is stony. It is so stony that you cannot make up your mind whether the thin soil is being formed of disintegrating stones, or whether there once was a soil which has been washed off down to the broken surface of the bedrock. And yet man can do with it what the Mormons have done with the great American desert, now fast becoming a garden land. In some places the water is thirty feet below the surface; in others fifteen hundred to two thousand feetbut there always is water, and once it bathes the surface it acts like a magician's wand.

Whenever you see a railway station it is in an oasis of green, with willow and eucalyptus trees, flowers, and vegetables. Before I woke up one

morning the train was at a place called Matjesfontein, and a man was calling out my name. When I was dressed and out on the platform I found that a Mr. J. D. Logan had heard I was passing through, and wished to invite me to breakfast.

As I rubbed my eyes I saw far and away on every side the stony, tufted, shimmering desert, yet close beside me were tree-shaded cottages, with blooming gardens and lawns around each. Hurried away from the picturesque station to a handsome house, I found a luxuriously ordered table, smoking hot viands led off by salmon from England, with trained servants to add to comfort as abundant as any one could wish.

This was Mr. Logan's village, and he is building a fine hotel as its chief glory. While we ate breakfast he dictated to his secretary letters of introduction to people further north, and before I finished my coffee the letters were handed to me type-written. When the train took me off Mr. Logan started on a shooting trip. The whole episode was like a tatter of dreamland—a little spring of enterprise gushing out in the desert—and yet just the sort of thing one runs upon in South Africa.