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$Title{Impressions Of South Africa
Chapter XVI - From Fort Salisbury To The Sea, Part I}
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$Date{1897}
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Title:       Impressions Of South Africa
Book:        Part III - A Journey Through South Africa
Author:      Bryce, James
Date:        1897

Chapter XVI - From Fort Salisbury To The Sea, Part I

Manicaland And The Portuguese Territories

     In Africa, moisture is everything.  It makes the difference between
fertility and barrenness; it makes the difference between a cheerful and a
melancholy landscape.  As one travels northeastward from Palapshwye to
Bulawayo, and from Bulawayo to Fort Salisbury, one passes by degrees from an
arid and almost rainless land to a land of showers and flowing waters. In
Bechuanaland there are, except for three months in the year, no streams at
all.  In Matabililand one begins to find brooks.  In Mashonaland there are at
last rivers, sometimes with rocky banks and clear, deep pools, which (like
that just mentioned) tempt one to bathe and risk the terrible snap of a
crocodile's jaws.  Thus eastern Mashonaland is far more attractive than the
countries which I have described in the last two chapters.  It has beautiful
and even striking scenery.  The soil, where the granitic rocks do not come too
near the surface, is usually fertile, and cultivation is easier than in the
regions to the southwest, because the rains are more copious.  There are many
places round Fort Salisbury and on the way thence to Mtali and Massikessi
where a man might willingly settle down to spend his days, so genial and so
full of beauty is the nature around him.  And as the land is high, it is also
healthful.  Except in a few of the valley bottoms, fever need not be feared,
even after the rains.

     From Fort Salisbury to the Indian Ocean at Beira it is a journey of three
hundred and seventy miles, of which the first one hundred and fifty-five are
in British, the rest in Portuguese, territory.  When the railway, which now
(May, 1897) runs inland for one hundred and fifty-eight miles from Beira, has
been completed to Fort Salisbury, this distance, which at present requires at
least eight days' travel, will become a trifle.  But those who will then hurry
through this picturesque region behind the locomotive will lose much of the
charm which the journey, by far the most attractive part of a South African
tour, now has for the lover of nature.

     For the first forty miles southeastward from Fort Salisbury the track
runs through a wooded country, diversified by broad stretches of pasture. Here
and there we found a European farm, marked in the distance by the waving tops
of the gum-trees, with the low wooden house festooned by the brilliant mauve
blossoms of the climbing Bougainvillea, and the garden inclosed by hedges of
grenadilla, whose fruit is much eaten in South Africa.  Vegetables raised on
these farms fetch enormous prices in the town, so that a man who understands
the business may count on making more by this than he will do by "prospecting"
for gold-mines or even by floating companies.  We found the grass generally
fresh and green, for some showers had fallen, and the trees, though still
small, were in new leaf with exquisite tints of red.  Now and then, through
gaps between the nearer hills, there are glimpses of dim blue mountains.  As
one gets farther to the southeast the hills are higher, and on either side
there rise fantastic kopjes of granite.  Their tops are cleft and riven by
deep fissures, and huge detached blocks are strewn about at their base, or
perched like gigantic tables upon the tops of pillars of rock, poised so
finely that one fancies a blast of wind might overthrow them.  These "perched
blocks," however, have not, like the blocs perches of western Europe, been
left by ancient glaciers or icebergs, for it seems still doubtful whether
there has been a glacial period in South Africa, and neither here nor in the
mountains of Basutoland could I discover traces of ancient moraines.  They are
due to the natural decomposition of the rock on the spot.  The alternate heat
of the day and cold of the night - a cold which is often great, owing to the
radiation into a cloudless sky - split the masses by alternate expansion and
contraction, make great flakes peel off them like the coats of an onion, and
give them these singularly picturesque shapes.  All this part of the country
is as eminently fit for a landscape-painter as Bechuanaland and the more level
parts of Matabililand are unfit, seeing that here one has foregrounds as well
as backgrounds, and the colors are as rich as the forms are varied.  For I
must add that in this region, instead of the monotonous thorny acacias of the
western regions, there is much variety in the trees; no tropical luxuriance, -
the air is still too dry for that, - but many graceful outlines and a great
diversity of foliage.  Besides, the wood has a way of disposing itself with
wonderful grace.  There is none of the monotony either of pine forests, like
those of northern and eastern Europe, or of such forests of deciduous trees as
one sees in Michigan and the Alleghanies, but rather what in England we call
"park-like scenery," though why nature should be supposed to do best when she
imitates art, I will not attempt to inquire.  There are belts of wood
inclosing secluded lawns, and groups of trees dotted over a stretch of rolling
meadow, pretty little bits of detail which enhance the charm of the ample
sweeps of view that rise and roll to the far-off blue horizon.

     Beyond Marandella's - the word sounds Italian, but is really the
Anglicized form of the name of a native chief - the country becomes still more
open, and solitary peaks of gneiss begin to stand up, their sides of bare,
smooth gray rock sometimes too steep to be climbed.  Below and between them
are broad stretches of pasture, with here and there, on the banks of the
streams, pieces of land which seem eminently fit for tillage. On one such
piece - it is called Lawrencedale - we found that two young Englishmen had
brought some forty acres into cultivation, and admired the crops of vegetables
they were raising partly by irrigation, partly in reliance on the rains.
Almost anything will grow, but garden-stuff pays best, because there is in and
round Fort Salisbury a market clamorous for it.  The great risk is that of a
descent of locusts, for these pests may in a few hours strip the ground clean
of all that covers it.  However, our young farmers had good hopes of scaring
off the swarms, and if they could do so their profits would be large and
certain.  A few hours more through driving showers, which made the weird
landscape of scattered peaks even more solemn, brought us to the halting-place
on Lezapi River, a pretty spot high above the stream, where the store which
supplies the neighborhood with the necessaries of life has blossomed into a
sort of hotel, with a good many sleeping-huts round it.  One finds these
stores at intervals of about twenty or thirty miles; and they, with an
occasional farm like that of Lawrencedale, represent the extremely small
European population, which averages less than one to a dozen square miles,
even reckoning in the missionaries that are scattered here and there.

     From Lezapi I made an excursion to a curious native building lying some
six miles to the east, which Mr. Selous had advised me to see.  The heat of
the weather made it necessary to start very early, so I was awakened while it
was still dark.  But when I stood ready to be off just before sunrise, the
Kafir boy, a servant of the store, who was to have guided me, was not to be
found.  No search could discover him.  He had apparently disliked the errand,
perhaps had some superstitious fear of the spot he was to lead me to, and had
vanished, quite unmoved by the prospect of his employer's displeasure and of
the sum he was to receive. The incident was characteristic of these natives.
They are curiously wayward. They are influenced by motives they cannot be
induced to disclose, and the motives which most affect a European sometimes
fail altogether to tell upon them.  With great difficulty I succeeded in
finding another native boy who promised to show me the way, and followed him
off through the wood and over the pastures, unable to speak a word to him, and
of course understanding not a word of the voluble bursts of talk with which he
every now and then favored me.  It was a lovely morning, the sky of a soft and
creamy blue, dewdrops sparkling on the tall stalks of grass, the rays of the
low sun striking between the tree-tops in the thick wood that clothed the
opposite hill, while here and there faint blue smoke-wreaths rose from some
Kafir but hut hidden among the brushwood.  We passed a large village, and just
beyond it overtook three Kafirs, all talking briskly, as is their wont, one of
them carrying a gun and apparently going after game.  A good many natives have
firearms, but acts of violence seem to be extremely rare.  Then, passing under
some rocky heights, we saw, after an hour and a half's fast walking, the group
of huts where the Company's native commissioner, whom I was going to find, had
fixed his station.  Some Kafirs were at work on their mealie-plots, and one of
them, dropping his mattock, rushed across and insisted on shaking hands with
me, saying "Moragos," which is said to be a mixture of Dutch and Kafir meaning
"Good morning, sir." The commissioner was living alone among the natives, and
declared himself quite at ease as to their behavior.  One chief dwelling near
had been restive, but submitted when he was treated with firmness; and the
natives generally - so he told me - seem rather to welcome the intervention of
a white man to compose their disputes.  They are, he added, prone to break
their promises, except in one case.  If an object, even if of small value, has
been delivered to them as a token of the engagement made, they feel bound by
the engagement so long as they keep this object, and when it is formally
demanded back they will restore it unharmed.  The fact is curious, and throws
light on some of the features of primitive legal custom in Europe.

     The commissioner took me to the two pieces of old building - one can
hardly call them ruins - which I had come to see.  One (called Chipadzi's) has
been already mentioned.  It is a bit of ancient wall of blocks of trimmed
granite, neatly set without mortar, and evidently meant to defend the most
accessible point on a rocky kopje, which in some distant age had been a
stronghold.  It has all the appearance of having been constructed by the same
race that built the walls of Dhlodhlo and Zimbabwye (though the work is not so
neat), and is called by the natives a Zimbabwye.  Behind it, in the center of
the kopje, is a rude low wall of rough stones inclosing three huts, only one
of which remains roofed.  Under this one is the grave of a famous chief called
Makoni, - the name is rather an official than a personal one, and his personal
name was Chipadzi, - the uncle of the present Makoni, who is the leading chief
of this district. ^1 On the grave there stands a large earthenware pot, which
used to be regularly filled with native beer when, once a year, about the
anniversary of this old Makoni's death, his sons and other descendants came to
venerate and propitiate his ghost.  Five years ago, when the white men came
into the country, the ceremony was disused, and the poor ghost is now left
without honor and nutriment.  The pot is broken, and another pot, which stood
in an adjoining hut and was used by the worshipers, has disappeared.  The
place, however, retains its awesome character, and a native boy who was with
us would not enter it. The sight brought vividly to mind the similar
spirit-worship which went on among the Romans and which goes on today in
China; but I could not ascertain for how many generations back an ancestral
ghost receives these attentions - a point which has remained obscure in the
case of Roman ghosts also.

[Footnote 1: He was the restive chief mentioned on the last preceding page,
who joined in the rising of 1896, and was, I believe, taken prisoner and
shot.]

     The other curiosity is much more modern.  It is a deserted native village
called Tchitiketi ("the walled town"), which has been rudely fortified with
three concentric lines of defense, in a way not common among the Kafirs.  The
huts, which have now totally disappeared, stood on one side of a rocky
eminence, and were surrounded by a sort of ditch ten feet deep, within which
was a row of trees planted closely together, with the intervals probably
originally filled by a stockade.  Some of these trees do not grow wild in this
part of the country, and have apparently been planted from shoots brought from
the Portuguese territories.  Within this outmost line there was a second row
of trees and a rough stone wall, forming an inner defense.  Still farther in
one finds a kind of citadel, formed partly by the rocks of the kopje, partly
by a wall of rough stones, ten feet high and seven to eight feet thick,
plastered with mud, which holds the stones together like mortar.  This wall is
pierced by small apertures, which apparently served as loopholes for arrows,
and there is a sort of narrow gate through it, only four and a half feet high,
covered by a slab of stone.  Within the citadel, several chiefs are buried in
crevices of the rock, which have been walled up; and there are still visible
the remains of the huts wherein, upon a wicker stand, were placed the pots
that held the beer provided for their ghosts.  Having ceased to be a royal
residence or a fortress, the spot remains, like the Escurial, a place of royal
sepulture.  The natives remember the names of the dead chiefs, but little
else, and cannot tell one when the fortress was built nor why it was forsaken.
Everything is so rude that one must suppose the use of loopholes to have been
learned from the Portuguese, who apparently came from time to time into these
regions; and the rudeness confirms the theory that the buildings at the Great
Zimbabwye were not the work of any of the present Bantu tribes, but of some
less barbarous race.

     It is not easy to find one's way alone over the country in these parts,
where no Kafir speaks English, and where the network of native foot-paths
crossing one another soon confuses recollection.  However, having a distant
mountain-peak to steer my course by, I succeeded in making my way back alone,
and was pleased to find that, though the sun was now high in heaven and I had
neither a sun-helmet nor a white umbrella, its rays did me no harm.  A
stranger, however, can take liberties with the sun which residents hold it
safer not to take.  Europeans in these countries walk as little as they can,
especially in the heat of the day. They would ride, were horses attainable,
but the horse-sickness makes it extremely difficult to find or to retain a
good animal.  All traveling for any distance is of course done in a wagon or
(where one can be had) in a Cape cart.

     From the Lezapi River onward the scenery grows more striking as one
passes immediately beneath some of the tall towers of rock which we had
previously admired from a distance.  They remind one, in their generally gray
hue and the extreme boldness of their lines, of some of the gneissose
pinnacles of Norway, such as those above Naerodal, on the Sogne Fiord. One of
them, to which the English have given the name of the Sugar Loaf, soars in a
face of smooth sheer rock nearly 1000 feet above the track, the lichens that
cover it showing a wealth of rich colors, greens and yellows varied here and
there by long streaks of black rain-drip.  Behind this summit to the
northeast, eight to twelve miles away, rose a long range of sharp, jagged
peaks, perfectly bare, and showing by their fine-cut lines the hardness of
their rock.  They were not very high, at most 2000 feet above the level of the
plateau, which is here some 4000 feet above sea-level.  But the nobility of
their forms, and their clear parched sternness as they stood in the intense
sunshine, made them fill and satisfy the eye beyond what one would have
expected from their height. That severe and even forbidding quality which is
perceptible in the aspect of the South African mountains, as it is in those of
some other hot countries, seems to be due, in some degree at least, to the
sense of their aridity and bareness.  One feels no longing to climb them, as
one would long to climb a picturesque mountain in Europe, because one knows
that upon their scorching sides there is no verdure and that no spring breaks
from beneath their crags.  Beautiful as they are, they are repellent; they
invite no familiarity; they speak of the hardness, the grimness, the silent
aloofness of nature.  It is only when they form the distant background of a
view, and especially when the waning light of evening clothes their stern
forms with tender hues, that they become elements of pure delight in the
landscape.

     Some fifteen miles east of this range we came upon a natural object we
had given up hoping to see in South Africa, a country where the element
necessary to it is so markedly deficient.  This was the waterfall on the Oudzi
River, one of the tributaries of the great Sabi River, which falls into the
Indian Ocean.  The Oudzi is not very large in the dry season, nor so full as
the Garry at Killiecrankie or the stream which flows through the Yosemite
Valley.  But even this represents a considerable volume of water for tropical
East Africa; and the rapid - it is really rather a rapid than a cascade - must
be a grand sight after heavy rain, as it is a picturesque sight even in
October.  The stream rushes over a ridge of very hard granite rock,
intersected by veins of finer-grained granite and of green-stone.  It has cut
for itself several deep channels in the rock, and has scooped out many
hollows, not, as usually, circular, but elliptical in their shape, polished
smooth, like the little pockets or basins which loose stones polish smooth as
they are driven round and round by the current in the rocky bed of a Scotch
torrent.  The brightness of the clear green water and the softness of the
surrounding woods, clothing each side of the long valley down which the eye
pursues the stream till the vista is closed by distant mountains, make these
falls one of the most novel and charming bits of scenery even in this romantic
land.  One more pleasant surprise was in store for us before we reached Mtali.
We had seen from some way off a mass of brilliant crimson on a steep hillside.
Coming close under, we saw it to be a wood whose trees were covered with fresh
leaves.  The locusts had eaten off all the first leaves three weeks before,
and this was the second crop.  Such a wealth of intense yet delicate reds of
all hues, pink, crimson, and scarlet, sometimes passing into a flushed green,
sometimes into an umber brown, I have never seen, not even in the autumn woods
of North America, where, as on the mountain that overhangs Montreal or round
the Saranac Lakes, the forest is aflame with the glow of the maples.  The
spring, if one may give that name to the season of the first summer rains, is
for South Africa the time of colors, as is the autumn in our temperate climes.

     Mtali - it is often written "Umtali" to express that vague half-vowel
which comes at the beginning of so many words in the Bantu languages - is a
pretty little settlement in a valley whose sheltered position would make it
oppressive but for the strong easterly breeze which blows nearly every day
during the hot weather.  There is plenty of good water in the hills all round,
and the higher slopes are green with fresh grass.  The town, like other towns
in these regions, is constructed of corrugated iron, - for wood is scarce and
dear, - with a few brick-walled houses and a fringe of native huts, while the
outskirts are deformed by a thick deposit of empty tins of preserved meat and
petroleum.  All the roofs are of iron, and a prudent builder puts iron also
into the foundation of the walls beneath the brick, in order to circumvent the
white ants.  These insects are one of the four plagues of South Central
Africa.  (The other three are locusts, horse-sickness, and fever.) They
destroy every scrap of organic matter they can reach, and will even eat their
way through brick to reach wood or any other vegetable matter above or within
the brick.  Nothing but metal stops them.  They work in the dark, constructing
for themselves a kind of tunnel or gallery if they have to pass along an open
space, as, for instance, to reach books upon a shelf.  (I was taken to see the
public library at Mtali, and found they had destroyed nearly half of it.) They
are small, less than half an inch long, of a dull grayish white, the queen, or
female, about three times as large as the others.  Her quarters are in a sort
of nest deep in the ground, and if this nest can be found and destroyed the
plague will be stayed, for a time at least.  There are several other kinds of
ants.  The small red ant gets among one's provisions and devours the cold
chicken.  We spent weary hours in trying to get them out of our food-boxes,
being unable to fall in with the local view that they ought to be eaten with
the meat they swarm over, as a sort of relish to it.  There is also the large
reddish-black ant, which bites fiercely, but is regarded with favor because it
kills the white ants when it can get at them.  But the white ant is by far the
most pernicious kind, and a real curse to the country.

     At the end of 1896, when the construction of the Beira railway from
Chimoyo to Fort Salisbury began to be energetically prosecuted, it was found
that to take the line past Mtali would involve a detour of some miles and a
heavy gradient in crossing a ridge at the Christmas Pass.  Mr. Rhodes promptly
determined, instead of bringing the railway to the town, to bring the town to
the railway.  Liberal compensation was accordingly paid to all those who had
built houses at old Mtali, and new Mtali is now (1897) rising on a carefully
selected site seven miles away.

     In 1895 there were about one hundred Europeans in the town of Mtali, all,
except the Company's officials and the storekeepers, engaged in prospecting
for or beginning to work gold-mines; for this is the center of one of the
first-explored gold districts, and sanguine hopes have been entertained of its
reefs.  We drove out to see some of the most promising in the Penha Longa
Valley, six miles to the eastward.  Here three sets of galleries have been
cut, and the extraction of the metal was said to be ready to begin if the
machinery could be brought up from the coast.  As to the value and prospects
of the reefs, over which I was most courteously shown by the gentlemen
directing the operations, I could of course form no opinion.  They are
quartz-reefs, occurring in talcose and chloritic schistose rocks, and some of
them maintain their direction for many miles. There is no better place than
this valley ^1 for examining the ancient gold-workings, for here they are of
great size.  Huge masses of alluvial soil in the bottom of the valley had
evidently been worked over, and indeed a few laborers are still employed upon
these.  But there had also been extensive open cuttings all along the
principal reefs, the traces of which are visible in the deep trenches
following the line of the reefs up and down the slopes of the hills, and in
the masses of rubbish thrown out beside them.  Some of these cuttings are
evidently recent, for the sides are in places steep and even abrupt, which
they would not be if during many years the rains had been washing the earth
down into the trenches. Moreover, iron implements have been found at the
bottom, of modern shapes and very little oxidized.  Probably, therefore, while
some of these workings may be of great antiquity, others are quite recent -
perhaps less than a century old.  Such workings occur in many places over
Mashonaland and Matabililand.  They are always open; that is to say, the reef
was worked down from the surface, not along a tunnel - a fact which has made
people think that they were carried on by natives only; and they always stop
when water is reached, as though the miners had known nothing of pumps.
Tradition has nothing to say as to the workings; but we know that during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a good deal of gold was brought down to
the Portuguese coast stations; and when the Mashonaland pioneers came in 1890,
there were still a few Portuguese trying to get the metal out of the alluvial
deposits along the stream banks.  The reefs, which are now being followed by
level shafts or galleries driven into the sides of the hills, are (in most
cases at least) the same as those which the old miners attacked from above.

[Footnote 1: It was here only, on the blanks of a stream, that I observed the
extremely handsome arboraceous St. John's-wort (Hypericum Schimperi),
mentioned in page 28.]