by John Buchan
The rivers unite a mile away, and the cleft of the Poort to which the twin streams hurried stood out as black as ink in the moonlight. Far up on the hillside the bush was burning, and the glare made the gorge like the gate of a mysterious world, guarded by flames and shadows. This Poort is fine by daylight, but still not more than an ordinary pass; but in the witching half-light it dominated the mind like a wild dream. After dinner we set out over the rough ground to where a cliff sank sheer from the moonlight into utter blackness. We heard the different notes of the two rivers — the rapid Magalies and the sedater Crocodile; and then we came to the bank of the united stream, and scrambling along it found ourselves in the throat of the pass. High walls of naked rock rose on either hand, and at last, after some hard walking, we saw a space of clear star-sown sky and the land beyond the mountains. I had expected a brawling torrent; instead, I found a long dark lagoon sleeping between the sheer sides. In the profound silence the place had the air of some underground world. The black waters seemed to have drowsed there since the Creation, unfathomably deep — a witch’s caldron, where the savage spirits of the hills might show their faces. Even as we gazed the moon came over the crest: the cliff in front sprang into a dazzling whiteness which shimmered back from the lagoon below. Far up on the summit was a great boulder which had a far-away likeness to an august human head. As the light fell on it the resemblance became a certainty: there were the long locks, the heavy brows, the profound eyes of a colossal Jove. Not Jove indeed, for he was the god of a race, but that elder deity of the natural man, grey-haired Saturn, keeping his ageless vigil, quiet as a stone, over the generations of his children. Forgotten earth-dwellers, Mosilikatse and his chiefs, Boer commandos, British yeomanry, — all had passed before those passionless eyes, as their successors will pass and be forgotten. And in the sense of man’s littleness there is comfort, for it is part of the title of our inheritance. The veld and the mountains continue for ever, austerely impartial to their human occupants: it is for the new-comer to prove his right to endure by the qualities which nature has marked for endurance.
August 1902.
CHAPTER VIII. THE WOOD BUSH.
Some thirty miles east of Pietersburg, the most northerly railway station in the Transvaal, the Leydsdorp coach, which once a-week imperils the traveller’s life, climbs laboriously into a nest of mountains, and on the summit enters an upland plateau, with shallow valleys and green forest-clad slopes. Twenty miles on and the same coach, if it has thus far escaped destruction, precipitously descends a mountain-side into the fever flats which line the Groot Letaba and the Letsitela. The Leydsdorp road thus cuts off a segment of a great irregular oblong, which is bounded on the south by the spurs of the Drakensberg, which the Boers call the Wolkberg or Mountain of Cloud, and on the north divided by the valley of the Klein Letaba from the Spelonken. It is a type of country found in patches in the de Kaap mountains, and in parts of Lydenburg; but here it exists in a completely defined territory of perhaps 700 square miles, divided sharply from high veld and bush veld. The average elevation may be 5000 feet, and, though cut up into valleys and ridges, it preserves the attributes of a tableland, so that on all sides one can journey to an edge and look down upon a wholly different land. But the geographical is the least of its distinctions. The climate has none of the high-veld dryness or the low-veld closeness, but is humid and sharp and wholesome all the year round. Mists and cool rains abound, every hollow has its stream, and yet frost is rarely known. Its vegetation, the configuration of its landscape, the soil itself, are all things by themselves in South Africa. Fever, horse-sickness, and most cattle diseases are unknown. It is little explored, for till quite lately the native tribes were troublesome, and only the poorer class of Boer squatted on its occupation farms, and, though a proclaimed gold-field for some years, the uitlander who strayed there had rarely an eye for its beauty. The unfortunate man who took his life in his hands and journeyed by coach to Leydsdorp forgot the landscape in the perils of the journey, and in all likelihood forgot most things in fever at the end of it. It remained, therefore, a paradise with a few devotees, a place secret and strange, with a beauty so peculiar that the people who tried to describe it were rarely believed. A delight in the Wood Bush is apt to spoil a man for other scenery. The high veld seems tame and monotonous, the bush veld an intolerable desert, and even the mountain glories of the Drakensberg something crude and barbarous after this soft, rich, and fascinating garden-land.
The mountains come into view a little way from Pietersburg, but there are many miles of featureless high veld to be covered before the foothills are reached. It was midsummer when I first travelled there, and the dusty waterless plains were glazed by the hot sun. The Sand River, filled with acres of fine sand, but not a drop of moisture, was not a cooling object in the scene, and the dusty thorn scrub offered no shade. But insensibly the country changed. Bold kopjes of rose-red granite appeared on the plain, and at a place called Kleinfontein the road turned sharply south, and we were confronted with a noble line of crags running out like a buttress from the mountains. At Smith’s Drift the road swerved east again, and a long valley appeared before us running up into the heart of the hills. A clear stream came down it, and the sides were dotted in bush-veld manner with redwood and sikkelboom and syringa, and a variety of thorns, of which the Kaffir waak-en-beetje and the knopjes-doorn were the prettiest. Occasionally the dull green of the olivienhout appeared, and when the bush ceased aloes raised their heads among the rocks. Everywhere the mimosa was in bloom, and the afternoon air was laden with a scent like limes. Towards the top the valley flattened out into upland meadows, little farms appeared dotted on the hillsides, and the yellow mimosa blossom on the slopes was so indistinguishable from gorse that in the half-light I could have sworn I was among Cumberland fells, and not on the edge of the tropics and 300 miles from the sea. We assisted a Boer farmer to slay a pig, had coffee afterwards with his family, and slept the sleep of the just on a singularly hard piece of ground under a magnificent sky of stars, being roused once to give a drink to a belated member of the S.A.C.
Shortly after dawn next day we toiled to the top of a long hill, and entered the Wood Bush. A high blue ridge — the Iron Crown mountain behind Haenertsburg — rose before us, which changed with the full light to a dazzling green, studded in the kloofs with patches of dark forest. Glimpses of other forest-crowned hills appeared in the turnings of the path; and when we had exhausted the horizon we had time to look at the roadside. It was a perfectly new country. The soil was as red as Devonshire, the steep sides oozed with little runnels of water. Thickly grassed meadows of the same dazzling yet delicate green fell away to the little hollows, where copses took their place, and now and then a small red farm showed in a group of alien gum-trees. It was so novel as to be almost unbelievable. And then in the meadows little shrubs like dwarf hazels appeared, which on closer view showed themselves as tree-ferns, — old gnarled veterans and young graceful saplings. The herbage, too, was gay with flowers, as gay as an English meadow save that for daisies there were patches of tall arums and lilies, and for buttercups a superb golden-belled campanula. I am no botanist and am not ashamed of it, but on that morning I regretted a wasted youth and many unprofitable hours given to the classics. By-and-by we descended on the little township of Haenertsburg, a cluster of rondhavels and the tents of an S.A.C. post. On leaving we crossed a torrent, the Bruderstroom, which later becomes the Groot Letaba and flows through miles of feverish deserts to join the Olifants and thence to the Limpopo. It was a true highland stream, with deep dark-blue pools, and great swirls of icy grey water sweeping round crags or stretching out into glistening shallows. On the high veld it would be dignified by the name of river, and be shorn and parcelled into a thousand water-furrows. But here it was but one of many, for every hollow had its limpid stream slipping out of sight among the tall grasses.
Beyond Haenertsburg the Iron Crown mountain comes into full view, with its green sides scarred and blackened in place
s with the works of gold-seekers. To the left rose the crags of the Wolkberg, and far behind the blue lines of the Drakensberg itself. To the north the true Wood Bush country appeared, an endless park laid out as if by a landscape gardener, with broad dales set with coppices, and little wood-covered hills. “A park-like country,” is the common travellers’ phrase for the bush veld; but there the grass is rank and ugly, the trees isolated thorns, and the whole land flat and waterless. Here was a true park, like Chatsworth or Windsor, so perfectly laid out that one could scarcely believe that it was not a work of man. For surely a park is properly man’s work, a flower of civilisation, which nature aids but rarely contrives. Yet when she does contrive, how far is the result beyond our human skill! For an exception the mountain-tops were free from mist; the land lay bathed in a cool morning light, and the scent of a thousand aromatic herbs — wormwood, southernwood, a glorified bog-myrtle, musk, and peppermint — rose from the wayside. Bracken was as plentiful as on a Scots moor, and the old familiar fragrance was like a breath of the sea. We breakfasted in a water-meadow, where a spring of cold water stole away through a forest of tree-ferns, arums, giant orchises, and the tall blue agapanthus. As we smoked our morning pipes and watched a white eagle and a brace of berghaans circling in the blue, I vowed that here at last had been found the true Hesperides.
A few miles on and we were on the farther edge. At a place called Skellum Kloof the road dips sharply over the crest, and down three break-neck miles to the Groot Letaba. Behind lay the green garden-land; in front, a hundred miles of broken country, fading in the far distance into misty flats. The little range of the Murchison hills ran out at right angles; away to the north the peaks of Majajie’s mountains, with the Spelonken beyond, blocked the horizon. As far as the eye could see, the faint blue line of the Rooi Rand, the Portuguese border, was just distinguishable from the sky, with the fingers of the little Lebombo breaking the thin line to the south. One forgot the weary miles of swamp and fever that lay between, and saw only a glorious sunlit plain, which might have been full of clear rivers and vineyards and white cities, instead of thorn and Kaffir huts and a few ugly mining shanties. The Wood Bush on its eastern side is a series of soft green folds, with the superb evergreen forest in every kloof. At first sight the woods look like hazel copses, and you plunge gaily in to your disaster. Below Skellum Kloof is a little wooded glen, into which I descended for water, and at one time there were doubts of my ever emerging again. The place was matted with monkey-creepers, mosses, huge ferns, and a thick undergrowth around the trunks of great trees. Yellowwoods, 200 feet high, essenwood, sneezewood, stinkwood, most of them valuable timber-trees, and all with a glossy dark foliage, rose out of the jungle to the confusion of the poor inhabitant below. I noticed some giant royals, some curious orchids, and quantities of maidenhair fern and the graceful asparagus creeper. But soon I noticed little beyond the exceeding toilsomeness of the passage. Every step had to be fought for, the place was hot to suffocation, and I was in mortal fear of snakes. Also, I had no desire to meet a bushbuck ram, than whom no fiercer fellow for his size exists, at close quarters in his native haunts. I kept down-hill, listening for water, and by-and-by rolled over a red scaur into an ice-cold pool, which was the only pleasing thing in the forest. Happily in returning I struck a native path, and reached open country in greater comfort. Two boys who had been sent to find me — Basutos, and, like all Basutos, fools in a thick wood — succeeded in getting lost themselves, and had to be searched for.
Hereabouts, when my ship comes home, I shall have my country house. There is a piece of flat land, perhaps six acres square, from which a long glen runs down to the Letaba. There I shall have my dwelling. In front there will be a park to put England to shame, miles of rolling green dotted with shapely woods, and in the centre a broad glade in which a salmon-river flows in shallows and falls among tree-ferns, arums, and bracken. There may be a lake, but I am undecided. In front I shall have a flower-garden, where every temperate and tropical blossom will appear, and in a sheltered hollow an orchard of deciduous trees, and an orange plantation. Highland cattle, imported at incredible expense, will roam on the hillsides. My back windows will look down 4000 feet on the tropics, my front on the long meadow vista with the Iron Crown mountain for the sun to set behind. My house will be long and low, with broad wings, built of good stone and whitewashed, with a thatched roof and green shutters, so that it will resemble a prazo such as some Portuguese seigneur might have dwelt in in old times. Within it will be cool and fresh, with stone floors and big fireplaces, for the mists are chill and the winds can blow sharply on the mountains. There will be good pictures and books, and quantities of horns and skins. I shall grow my own supplies, and make my own wine and tobacco. Rides will be cut in the woods, and when my friends come to stay we shall drive bushbuck and pig, and stalk tiger-cats in the forest. There will be wildfowl on my lake, and Lochleven trout in my waters. And whoever cares to sail 5000 miles, and travel 1500 by train, and drive 50 over a rough road, will find at the end of his journey such a palace as Kubla Khan never dreamed of. The accomplishment is difficult, but not, I trust, impossible. Once upon a time, as the story goes, a Dutchman talked with a predikant about the welfare of his soul. “You will assuredly be damned,” said the predikant, “and burn in hell.” “Not so,” said the Dutchman. “If I am so unfortunate as to get in there, I shall certainly get out again.” “But that is folly and an impossibility,” said the predikant. “Ah,” said the other with confidence, “wait and see: I shall make a plan.” Ek sal ‘n plan maak — this must be my motto, and I shall gratefully accept all honourable suggestions.
The country is full of wealth — mines, agriculture, forestry, and pasturage. The presence of payable gold, both in quartz and banket, is undoubted, and some improvement in the roads, possibly a light railway, and the completion of the Selati line may provide for the rise of Haenertsburg from a very little dorp into a flourishing township. There is magnificent pasturage for stock, for cattle diseases are few and horse-sickness is unknown. It has been said that one acre in the Wood Bush will carry an ox, and though this is an exaggeration, it is certain that the rich herbage will maintain three or four times the head of stock which can be run on the high veld. The grass in spring is very early, and in the worst part of winter the forests can be resorted to, so that hand-feeding is almost unknown. The grass is sour veld, but any extensive pasturing would soon bring it into the sweet veld class. Once it were properly grazed down, it would be also a natural sheep country of high value. The soil is a clayey red loam, and the moist climate provides perfect conditions for most seed crops. Tobacco would thrive well — as well perhaps as on the lower slopes along the Groot Letaba, where Mr Altenroxel produces excellent pipe tobacco and a respectable cigar. It is a paradise for vegetables, and all hardy fruits and a few sub-tropical ones could be made to flourish in the rich straths. It is a land for small holdings, save for a few larger farms on the hill-tops, and here might arise a community of British settlers, making a new England out of a country which already possesses the climate of the West Highlands and the configuration of a Sussex park.
At Skellum Kloof we descended from the uplands to an elevation of about 2000 feet, a type of scenery half-way between the wholesome high veld and the pernicious flats of the Lower Letaba. I take that descent to be all but the worst in the Transvaal, second only to the appalling cliff over which the road from Lydenburg drops to the Olifants. The grades are so steep that with a waggon it is necessary to outspan all animals but the two wheelers, and lock the wheels tightly. With a two-wheeled Cape cart to attempt it is to court destruction. Just at the foot is an awesome corner, and then a straight slope to the Letaba, a stream about the size of the Spean and not unlike it. There is a fine salmon pool below the ford, in which I swam circumspectly, being in dread of stray crocodiles. The valley has nothing of that raw unfinished look so common in South African landscapes. The peaks rise in noble contours from long stretches of forest and Kaffir tillage. A
s we crossed, the mist drooped over the hills and we ascended the far side to our camp in a heavy persistent rain. The whole country was full of crying waters, and but for the clumps of wild bananas and the indescribable African smell, we might have been climbing to a Norwegian saeter after a long day’s fishing.
All night it rained in torrents, and next morning — New Year’s Day — dawned in the same driving misty weather. We could not see twenty yards, and the long sloppy grass and thick red mud of the roads made bad going even for Afrikander ponies. We sent our heavy transport back, and, carrying little more than a dry shirt and a toothbrush, struck down a track which follows the eastern ridge of the valley. The vegetation was as dense as any jungle, and swishing through the reeds and ducking the low branches of trees soaked us to the skin in a few minutes. But in spite of discomfort it was a fascinating ride. The heavy tropical scents which the rain brought out of the ground, the intense silence of the drooping mists and water-laden forests, the clusters of beehive Kaffir huts in the hollows, all made up a world strange and new to the sight and yet familiar to the imagination. This was the old Africa of a boy’s dream, and there is no keener delight than to realise an impression of childhood. Yet, though the air blew sharp, there was something unwholesome in it. Fever lurked in the comely glens, and the clear reaches of the Letaba were not the honest, if scanty, waters of the high veld. The pungent penetrating smell of the herbs we trod underfoot had an uncanniness in it as if all were simples and antidotes — a faint medicinal flavour like the ante-chamber of a physician.