Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  “Wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world”;

  now we were in the midst of light and colour and elfish merriment. To me there is nothing solemn in a veld-fire — nothing but madness and fantasy. The veld, so full at other times of its own sadness, the

  “Acerbo indegno mistero della cose,”

  becomes demented, and cries an impish defiance to the austere kings who sit in Orion. The sight raised our spirits, and we stumbled down the long hillside in a better temper. By-and-by a house of a sort appeared in the valley bottom, and a dog’s bark told us that it was inhabited. To our relief we found that we had actually struck our outspan, Korannafontein, having approached it from the opposite side. The Koranna have long since gone from it, and the sole inhabitant was a Jew storekeeper, a friendly person, who assisted us to doctor our very weary horses. The ways of the Jew are past all finding out. Refuse to grant him a permit for himself and goods, and he says nothing; but he is in occupation months before the Gentile, unless that Gentile comes from Aberdeen. Our friend had his store stocked, and where he got the transport no man knows. He spoke well of the neighbourhood, both of Boer and native. The natives here, he said, are civilised. I asked him his definition of civilisation. “They speak Dutch,” he said, — an answer worth recording. We camped for the night behind what had once been the wool-shed. The floor of the tent was dirty, and, foolishly, I sent a boy to “mak skoon.” He made “skoon” by digging up dust with a shovel and storing it in heaps in different corners. About midnight the rain fell heavily, and a little later a great wind rose and put those dust-heaps in circulation. I awoke from dreams of salmon-fishing with a profound conviction that I had been buried under a landslip. I crawled hastily through a flap followed by a stream of dust, and no ventilation could make that tent habitable, so that in the morning we awoke with faces like colliers, and throats as dry as the nether millstone.

  From Korannafontein to Lichtenburg is something over forty miles, so we started at daybreak and breakfasted at a place called Rhenosterput, where some gentleman sent a Mauser bullet over our heads to remind us of his presence. The country was downland, very full of Namaqua partridge and the graceful spur-winged plover, a ranching country, for the streams had little fall and less water. At midday we outspanned at a pretty native village called Rooijantjesfontein, with a large church after the English village pattern, and a big dam lined with poplars. The life of a commercial missionary, who bought a farm when land was cheap and had it cultivated by his congregation, is a pleasant one: he makes a large profit, spends easy days, and returns early to his native Germany. It is a type I have little patience with, for it discredits one of the most heroic of human callings, and turns loose on society the slim Christian native, who brings Christianity and civilisation alike into discredit. We were now out of the region of tracks and on the main road to Lichtenburg, and all afternoon we travelled across the broad shallow basin of the Hartz River with our goal full in view on a distant hill-top. Far off on our right we saw a curious sight — a funeral waggon with a train of mourners creeping slowly across the veld. The Boers, as we heard from many sources, are exhuming the dead from different battle-fields, and bringing them, often from great distances, to the graveyards on their own homesteads. An odd sombre task, not without its grandeur; for to the veld farmer, as to the old Roman, there are Lares and Penates, and he wishes at the last to gather all his folk around him.

  III.

  Lichtenburg, as I have said, stands on a hill-top, but when one enters he finds a perfect model of a Dutch village. The streets are lined with willows and poplars, and seamed with water-furrows, and all the principal buildings surround a broad village green on which cattle were grazing. Seen in the morning it lost nothing of its attractiveness; and it dwells in my memory as a fresh clean place, looking over a wide upland country, — a place where men might lead honest lives, and meet the world fearlessly. It has its own relics of war. The court-house roof and walls are splashed with bullets, relics of Delarey’s fight with the Northumberland Fusileers. General Delarey is himself the principal inhabitant. He owns much land in the neighbourhood, and his house stands a few miles out on the Mafeking road. From this district was drawn all that was most chivalrous and resolute in the Boer forces; and the name of their leader is still a synonym with lovers of good fighting men for the finest quality of his race.

  The Zeerust road is as bad going for waggons as I have ever seen. It runs for miles through a desert where the soil is as black as in Lancashire, and a kind of coaly dust rises in everlasting clouds. We started late in the day, so that sunset found us some distance from water, in a featureless country. We were to outspan at the famous Malmani Oog — the eye of the Malmani; but a fountainhead is not a good goal on a dark night to ignorant travellers. Shortly after dusk we rode on ahead to look for the stream. Low slopes of hills rose on all sides, but nowhere could we see a gleam or a hollow which might be water. The distance may have been short, but to a hungry and thirsty man it seemed endless, as one hill after another was topped without any result. We found a fork in the road, and took the turn to the left as being more our idea of the way. As it happened we were trekking straight for the Kalahari Desert, and but for the lucky sound of a waggon on the other road might have been floundering there to-day. We turned aside to ask for information, and found we were all but at the Oog, which lay in the trees a hundred yards off. The owner of the waggon was returning to Lichtenburg with a sick wife, whom he had taken to Zeerust for a change. He had been a road surveyor under the late Government, had served on Delarey’s staff, and had been taken prisoner. A quiet reserved man with dignified manners, he answered our questions without complaint or petulance. There is something noble in travel when pursued in this stately leisure. The great buck-waggon, the sixteen solemn oxen lumbering on, the master walking behind in the moonlight, have an air of patriarchal dignity, an elder simplicity. I suppose fifteen to twenty miles might be a good day’s march, but who shall measure value by miles? It is the life for dreams, for roadside fires, nights under the stars, new faces studied at leisure, good country talk, and the long thoughts of an unharassed soul. Let us by all means be up and doing, setting the world to rights and sounding our own trumpet; but is the most successful wholly at ease in the presence of great mountains and forests, or men whose lives share in the calm cycle of nature?

  The night in tents was bitterly cold, and the morning bath, taken before sunrise in the springs of Malmani, was the most Arctic experience I have ever met. We left our drivers to inspan and follow, and set off down the little stream with our guns. There are hours which live for ever in the memory — hours of intense physical exhilaration, the pure wine of health and youth, when the mind has no thoughts save for the loveliness of earth, and the winds of morning stir the blood to a heavenly fervour. No man who has experienced such seasons can be other than an optimist. Dull nights in cities, heartless labours with pen and ink, the squalid worries of business and ambition, all are forgotten, and in the retrospect it is those hours which stand up like shining hill-tops — the type of the pure world before our sad mortality had laid its spell upon it. It is not pleasure — the word is too debased in human parlance; nor happiness, for that is for calm delights. Call it joy, that “enthusiasm” which is now the perquisite of creeds and factions, but which of old belonged to the fauns and nymphs who followed Pan’s piping in the woody hollows of Thessaly. I have known and loved many streams, but the little Malmani has a high place in my affections. The crystal water flowed out of great reed-beds into a shallow vale, where it wound in pools and cataracts to a broad ford below a ruined mill. Thence it passed again into reed-beds fringed with willows and departed from our ken. There was a bamboo covert opposite full of small singing birds; the cries of snipe and plover rose from the reed-beds, and the fall of water, rarest of South African sounds, tinkled like steel in the cold morning air. We shot nothing, for we saw nothing; the glory of the scene was all that mortal eye could hold at once. And then our waggon
s splashed through the ford, and we had perforce to leave it.

  We took a hill road, avoiding the detour by Malmani Drift, and after some hours in a country of wooded glens, came into the broad valley of the Klein Marico. The high veld and its scenery had been left far behind. Something half tropical, even in this mid-winter, was in the air of those rich lowlands. After the bleak uplands of Lichtenburg it was pleasant to see good timber, the green of winter crops, and abundant runnels of water. The farm-houses were larger and in fair repair, — embowered, too, in orange-groves, with the golden fruit bright among the glossy leaves. Blossom was appearing in every orchard; new and strange birds took the place of our enemy the korhaan; and for the first time on our journey we saw buck on the slopes. The vale was ringed with stony tree-clad hills like the Riviera, and in the hot windless noon the dust hung in clouds about us, so that, in spite of water and greenery, my impression of that valley is one of thirst and discomfort. Zeerust is a pretty village close under the hills, with tree-lined streets, — a prosperous sleepy place, with no marks of the ravages of war. The farmers, too, are a different stock from the high-veld Boers; they get their living more easily, and in their swarthy faces and slouching walk one cannot read the hard-bitten spirit which inspired the men of Botha and Delarey. They seemed on good terms with their new masters. We attended a gymkhana given by the South African Constabulary, and the Dutch element easily predominated in the crowd which watched the races. A good-humoured element, too, for the men smoked and criticised the performances in all friendliness, while their womenkind in their Sunday clothes thronged to the marquees for tea.

  IV.

  The Rustenburg road runs due east through a fine defile called Klein Marico Poort, and thence in a country of thick bush for twenty miles to the ford of the Groot Marico. We started before dawn, and did not halt for breakfast till the said ford, by which time the sun was high in the heavens and we were very hot, dusty, and hungry. Lofty wooded hills rose to the north, and not forty miles off lay the true hunting-veld, with koodoo, water-buck, and hippopotamus. Bird life was rich along the road — blue jays, rollers, and the handsome malicious game-bird which acts as scout to the guinea-fowl, and with his harsh call informs them of human presence. The farms were small and richly watered, with laden orange-groves and wide ruined verandahs. The people of Zeerust had spoken with tears in their eyes of the beautiful condition of this road, but we found it by far the worst in our travels. It lay deep in sand, was strewn with ugly boulders, and at one ford was so impossible that we had to make a long detour over virgin veld. The Great Marico, which, like all streams in the northern watershed, joins the Limpopo, and indeed forms its chief feeder, is a muddy tropical water, very unlike the clear Malmani. Beyond it the country becomes bare and pastoral again, full of little farms, to which the bulk of the inhabitants had returned. It was the most smiling country we had seen, for bush-veld has an ineradicable air of barbarism, but a green open land with white homesteads among trees is the true type of a settled country. Apricot blossom lay like a soft haze on the landscape. The young grass was already springing in the sheltered places, the cold dusty winds had gone, and a forehint of spring was in the calm evening.

  We spent the night above the Elands River, a very beautiful full water, almost on the site of the battle. The Elands River fight seems to have slipped from the memory of a people who made much of lesser performances; but to soldiers it is easily the Thermopylæ of the war. Five hundred or so of Australians of different regiments, with a few Rhodesians, were marching to join another force, when they were cut off at Elands River by 3000 Boers. They were invited to surrender, and declined. A small number took up a position beside the stream; the remainder held a little ridge in the centre of the amphitheatre of hills. For several days they toiled at dug-outs — terrible days, for they were shelled continually from the whole rim of the amphitheatre. One relieving force from the west retired in despair; a relieving force from the east was deceived by false heliograms, and went away, believing the work accomplished. Then came the report that they had surrendered; and then, after some fifteen days, they were found by Lord Kitchener, still holding the forlorn post. It was a mere sideshow, but to have been there was worth half the clasps in the campaign. More shells were fired into that little place than into Mafeking, and the courage of the few by the river who passed up water in the night to their comrades is beyond praise. The Colonials will long remember Elands River. It was their own show: without generalship or orders, against all the easy traditions of civilised warfare, the small band followed the Berserker maxim, and vindicated the ancient dignity of arms. In the morning we went over the place. The dug-outs were still mostly intact, and in a little graveyard beneath rude crosses slept the heroic dead.

  A few miles farther on and the summit of a ridge was reached, from which the eye looked over a level valley to the superb western line of the Magaliesberg. Straight in front was the cleft of Magata’s Nek, beyond which Rustenburg lay. The western Magaliesberg disappoints on closer acquaintance. The cliffs prove to be mere loose kranzes, the glens are waterless, the woods are nothing but barren thorn. But seen from afar in the clear air of dawn, when the darkness is still lurking in the hollows and the blue peaks are flushed with sunrise, it is a fairyland picture, a true mountain barrier to an enchanted land. Our road swung down a long slope to the Coster River, where we outspanned, and then through a sandy wilderness to the drift of the Selons. From this it climbed wearily up to the throat of the nek, a dull tract of country with few farms and no beauties. The nek, too, on closer view has little to commend it, save the prospect that opens on the other side. The level green plateau of Rustenburg lay before us, bounded on the north by a chain of kopjes, and on the south by the long dark flanks of the Magaliesberg as it sweeps round to the east. A few miles and the village itself came in sight, with a great church, as at Wakkerstroom, standing up like some simple rural cathedral over the little houses. Rustenburg was always the stronghold of the straitest sect of the Boers; and in the midst of the half-tropical country around, this sweep of pasture, crowned with a white kirk, had something austere and Puritan in its air, — the abode of a people with their own firm traditions, hostile and masterful towards the world. The voortrekker having fought his way through the Magaliesberg passes, outspanned his tired oxen on this pleasant upland, and called it his “city of rest.” And it still looks its name, for no orchards and gardens can make it otherwise than a novelty in the landscape — sober, homely, and comforting, like some Old Testament Elam where there were twelve wells of water and three-score and ten palm-trees, or the “plain called Ease” wherein Christian “walked with much content.”

  V.

  We took up our quarters at a farm a little way south of the town in the very shadow of the mountains. It was a long, low, rambling house called Boschdaal, with thick walls and cool passages. All around were noble gum-trees; a clear stream ran through the garden, which even at this season was gay with tropical flowers; and the orchard was heavy with oranges, lemons, and bananas. A little conical hill behind had a path made to its summit, whence one had a wide prospect of the Magaliesberg and the whole plateau. There were sheer cliffs in the background, with a waterfall among them; and between them and the house were some miles of park-like country where buck came in the morning. The rooms were simply but pleasantly furnished; the walls a forest of horns; and the bookcases full of European classics, with a great abundance of German story-books for children, telling how wicked Gretchen amended her ways, or little Hans saved his pennies. Altogether a charming dwelling-place, where a man might well spend his days in worthy leisure, shooting, farming, gardening, and smoking his pipe in the evening, with the sunset flaming over the hills.

  We spent two nights in Rustenburg, visiting in the daytime a horse depot to which a number of brood mares had been brought for winter grazing, and paying our respects to a neighbouring chief, Magata, who lives in a stad from which many town councils might learn a lesson of cleanliness and order. The
natives are as rich as Jews from the war, owning fine spans of oxen and Army Service Corps waggons, and altogether disinclined to stir themselves for wages. This prosperity of the lower race must be a bitter pill for the Boer to swallow, as he drives in for his rations with a team of wretched donkeys, and sees his former servants with buck-waggons and cattle. We watched strings of Burghers arriving at the depot, and at night several fires in the neighbouring fields told of their outspans. Most of them were polite and communicative: a very few did their business in sulky silence. There was one man who took my fancy. Originally he must have been nearly seven feet high, but a wound in the back had bent him double. He had long black hair, and sombre black eyes which looked straight before him into vacancy. He had a ramshackle home-made cart and eight donkeys, and a gigantic whip, of which he was a consummate master. A small boy did his business for him, while he sat hunched up on his cart speaking hoarsely to his animals, and cracking his whip in the air, — a man for whom the foundations of the world had been upset, and henceforth, like Cain, a dweller apart.

  On the third morning we started regretfully, for Pretoria was only two days distant. This was the pleasantest stage in our journey: the air was cool and fine, the roads good, water abundant, and a noble range of mountains kept us company. This is the tobacco-land of the Transvaal, whence comes the Magaliesberg brand, which has a high reputation in South Africa. There are no big farms but a great number of small holdings, richly irrigated and populous — the stronghold of Mr Kruger in former times, for he could always whistle his Rustenburgers to his will. Now and then a pass cleft the mountain line on our right, and in the afternoon we came in sight of the great gap through which the Crocodile River forces its passage. Farther east, and at a higher altitude, lay Silikat’s Nek, which is called after Mosilikatse. It was approaching sunset as we crossed Commando Nek, which is divided from Crocodile Poort by a spur of mountain, and looked over the Witwatersberg rolling south to the Rand and the feverish life of cities. High up on a peak stood a castellated blockhouse, looking like a peel tower in some old twilight of Northumbrian hills, and to the left and right the precipitous cliffs of the Magaliesberg ran out to the horizon. At the foot of the pass we forded the Magalies River, a stream of clear water running over a bed of grey-blue stones, and in another half-hour we had crossed the bridge of the Crocodile and outspanned on the farther bank.