History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0234/02341.txt

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$Title{Impressions Of South Africa
Chapter XVI - From Fort Salisbury To The Sea, Part II}
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$Author{Bryce, James}
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$Subject{river
country
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$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 II

     North of Penha Longa lies an attractive bit of country, near a place
called Inyanga, which, unfortunately, we had not time to visit.  It is a sort
of table-land about thirty miles long by fifteen wide, from 6000 to 7000 feet
above sea-level, with the highest summits reaching 8000 feet; and in respect
of its height enjoys not only a keen and bracing air, but a copious rainfall,
which makes it a specially good grazing-country.  It will probably one day
become not only the choicest ranching-ground of East Central Africa, but also
a health resort from the surrounding countries. At present it is quite empty,
the land having been, as I was told, bought up by several syndicates, who are
holding it in hope of a rise in prices. Here are the remarkable stone-cased
pits (referred to in Chapter IX); and here there are also numerous ancient
artificial watercourses for irrigating the soil, which were probably, Mr.
Rhodes thinks, constructed by some race of immigrants accustomed to artificial
irrigation in their own country, for it would hardly have occurred to natives
to construct such works here, where the rainfall is sufficient for the needs
of tillage.  Still farther to the north is a less elevated region, remarkable
for the traces it bears of having been at one time densely populated. Tillage
was so extensive that the very hillsides were built up into terraces to be
planted with crops.  To-day there are hardly any inhabitants, for a good many
years ago Mzila, the father of Gungunhana, chief of a fierce and powerful
tribe which lives on the lower course of the Sabi River, raided all this
country, and in successive invasions killed off or chased away the whole
population.  Such wholesale slaughter and devastation is no uncommon thing in
the annals of South Africa. Tshaka, the uncle of Cetewayo, annihilated the
inhabitants over immense tracts round Zululand.  And in comparison with such
bloodthirsty methods the Assyrian plan of deporting conquered populations from
their homes to some distant land may have seemed, and indeed may have been, a
substantial step in human progress.  However, just when Tshaka was massacring
his Kafir neighbors, the Turks were massacring the Christians of Chios, and at
the time of our visit, in October, 1895, Abdul-Hamid was beginning his
massacres in Asia Minor; so perhaps the less said about progress the better.

     The track from Mtali to the sea crosses a high ridge at a point called
the Christmas Pass, and descends into Portuguese territory through some very
noble and varied mountain scenery. ^1 It reminded us sometimes of the Italian
slopes of the eastern Alps, sometimes of the best parts of the Perthshire
Highlands, though of course it was rather in the forms of hill and valley than
in the trees that clothed their slopes that this resemblance lay.  The first
Portuguese settlement is at a place called Macequece, or Massikessi, where the
pioneers of the British South Africa Company conducted in 1891 a little war on
their own account with the Portuguese, whose superior forces they routed.  The
Portuguese claimed all this inland region on the Hinterland principle, in
respect of their ownership of the coast, while the British pioneers relied on
the fact that their adversaries had never established a really effective
occupation. The dispute was carried by the Portuguese Mozambique Company into
the English courts of law, ^2 and was ultimately adjusted diplomatically by an
agreement between the British and Portuguese governments, signed June 11,
1891.  The delimitation of the frontiers was not fully completed in this
region till 1896, but Massikessi was by the treaty of 1891 left to Portugal.
After Massikessi the mountains recede, and wide plains begin to open to the
east and south.  As the country sinks, the temperature rises and the air grows
heavier and less keen.  The ground is covered with wood, and in the woods
along the streams a few palms and bamboos and other tropical forms of
vegetation begin to appear.  But we found the woods in many places stripped
bare.  Terrible swarms of locusts has passed, leaving a track of dismal
bareness.  It had been a dry year, too, and even what grass the locusts had
spared was thin and withered.  Thus for want of food the cattle had perished.
All along the road from Mtali we saw oxen lying dead, often by some pool in a
brook, to which they had staggered to drink, and where they lay down to die.
We encountered few wagons, and those few were almost all standing with the
team unyoked, some of their beasts dead or sickly, some, too weak to draw the
load farther, obliged to stand idly where they had halted till the animals
should regain strength, or fresh oxen be procured.  This is what a visitation
of locusts means, and this is how the progress of the country is retarded by
the stoppage of the only means of transport.  No wonder that over all the
districts we had traversed, from Fort Salisbury southward, the cry had been
for the completion of the railway.  It is, indeed, the first need of these
territories; and those who have seen what the want of it has meant are
rejoiced to think that by the end of 1897 it will probably have reached Mtali,
and in a year or two more have been carried on to Fort Salisbury. As far as
Massikessi there will be no great difficulty, for, though the country is
hilly, the gradients need seldom be severe.  Thence northward across the
mountains for some distance skilful engineering will be required.  But in
South Africa, as in western America, railways are built in a rough-and-ready
way, which recks little of obstacles that would prove very costly in Europe.

[Footnote 1: It is in the midst of this scenery that new Mtali is being now
built (1897).]

[Footnote 2: Law Reports for 1893, A. C., p. 602.]

     We reached the present terminus of the railway at Chimoyo after two days'
long and fatiguing travel from Mtali, including an upset of our vehicle in
descending a steep donga to the bed of a streamlet - an upset which might
easily have proved serious, but gave us nothing worse than a few bruises.  The
custom being to start a train in the afternoon and run it through the night, -
as yet all trains are practically special, - we had plenty of time to look
round the place, and fortunately found a comfortable inn and a most genial
Scottish landlord from Banffshire. There was, however, nothing to see, not
even Portuguese local color; for though Chimoyo is well within the Portuguese
frontier, the village is purely British, living by the transport service which
makes the end of the railway its starting-point for the territories of the
Company.  Having nothing else to do, I climbed through the sultry noon to the
top of the nearest kopje, a steep granite hill which, as I was afterward told,
is a favorite "house of call" for lions.  No forest monarch, however,
presented himself to welcome me, and I was left to enjoy the view alone.  It
was striking.  Guarding the western horizon rose the long chain of mountains
from which we had emerged, stretching in a huge arc from southeast to north,
with some bold outlying peaks flung forward from the main mass, all by their
sharp, stern outlines, in which similar forms were constantly repeated,
showing that they were built of the same hard crystalline rocks. Beneath, the
country spread out in a vast, wooded plain, green or brown, according as the
wood was denser in one part and sparser in another.  It was still low wood,
with no sense of tropical luxuriance about it, and the ground still dry, with
not a glimpse of water anywhere.  Here and there isolated heights rose out of
this sea of wood, whose abrupt craggy tops glistened in the sunlight.  To the
east the plain fell slowly away to an immensely distant horizon, where lay the
deadly flats that border the Indian Ocean.  Except where the iron roofs of the
huts at Chimoyo shone, there was not a sign of human dwelling or human labor
through this great wild country, lying still and monotonous under a cloudless
sky.  It has been a wilderness from the beginning of the world until now,
traversed, no doubt, many centuries ago by the gold-seekers whose favorite
track went up from the coast past Great Zimbabwye into what is now
Matabililand, traversed again occasionally in later times by Portuguese
traders, but in no wise altered during these thousands of years from its
original aspect. Now at last its turn has come.  A new race of gold-seekers
have built a railway, and along the railway, wherever there are not swamps to
breed fever, the land will be taken for farms, and the woods will be cut down,
and the wild beasts will slink away, and trading-posts will grow into
villages, and the journey from Beira to Bulawayo will become as easy and
familiar as is to-day the journey from Chicago to San Francisco, through a
country which a century ago was as little known as this African wilderness.

     The railway from Chimoyo to the sea has one of the narrowest gages in the
world (two feet), and its tiny locomotives and cars have almost a toy air.  It
has, however, rendered two immense services to this region: it has abridged
the toilsome and costly ox transport of goods from Beira to the edge of the
high country - a transport whose difficulty lay not merely in the badness of
the track through ground almost impassable during and after the rains, but
also in the prevalence of the tsetse-fly, whose bite is fatal to cattle; and
it carries travelers in a few hours across one of the most unhealthy regions
in the world, most of which is infested by fevers in and after the wet season,
and the lower parts of which are so malarious that few who spend three nights
in them, even in the dry season, escape an attack.  Things will doubtless
improve when the country grows more settled, and the marshes have been
drained, and the long grass has been eaten down by cattle; for when the
tsetse-fly ceases to be dangerous cattle may come in.  It appears that the fly
kills cattle not by anything poisonous in its bite, but because it
communicates to them a minute parasite which lives in the blood of some kinds
of game, and which is more pernicious to cattle than it is to the game.
Accordingly, when the game vanishes, the fly either vanishes also or becomes
comparatively harmless. Already places once infested by it have by the
disappearance of the game become available for ranching.  Recent researches
seem to have shown that malarial fevers in man are also due to an animal
parasite; and this discovery is thought to damp the hope, which I remember to
have heard Mr. Darwin express, that the fever-stricken regions of the tropics
might become safe by ascertaining what the fever microbe is and securing men
against it by inoculation.  But the banks of the rivers and other damper spots
will still continue to breed this curse of maritime Africa.  The railway was
made entirely by native labor gathered from the surrounding regions, and the
contractors told me they had less difficulty with the Kafirs than they
expected.  It paid, however, a heavy toll in European life.  Not one, I think,
of the engineers and foremen escaped fever, and many died.  The risk for those
employed on the line is of course now much slighter, because the worst spots
are known and there are now houses to sleep in.  There is talk of widening the
line, whose small trucks would be unequal to a heavy traffic.  But considering
the difficulties overcome, especially in the swampy lands toward the coast,
great parts of which are flooded in January and February, it reflects great
credit on those who constructed it.

     Shortly after leaving Chimoyo the train ran through a swarm of locusts
miles long.  It was a beautiful sight.  The creatures flash like red
snowflakes in the sun; the air glitters with their gauzy wings.  But it is
also appalling.  An earthquake or a volcanic eruption is hardly more
destructive and hardly more irresistible.  The swarms may be combated when the
insect walks along the ground, for then trenches may be dug into which the
advancing host falls.  But when it flies nothing can stop it.  It is
noteworthy that for eighteen years prior to the arrival of the British
pioneers in 1890 there had been no great swarms.  Since that year there have
been several; so the Kafir thinks that it is the white man's coming that has
provoked the powers of evil to send the plague.

     We ran down the one hundred and eighteen miles from Chimoyo to
Fontesvilla during the afternoon and night, halting for three or four hours
for dinner at a clearing where a hotel and store have been built. The pace was
from ten to fifteen miles an hour.  After the first twenty miles, during which
one still has glimpses of the strange, isolated peaks that spring up here and
there from the plain, the scenery becomes rather monotonous, for the line runs
most of the way through thick forest, the trees higher than those of the
interior, yet not of any remarkable beauty. For the last twenty-five miles the
railway traverses a dead and dreary flat.  The gentle rise of the ground to
the west conceals even the outlying spurs of the great range behind, and to
the north and south there is an unbroken level.  The soil is said to be
generally poor, a very thin layer of vegetable mold lying over sand, and the
trees are few and seldom tall.  It is a country full of all sorts of game,
from buffaloes, elands, and koodoos downward to the small antelopes; and as
game abounds, so also do lions abound.  The early morning is the time when
most of these creatures go out to feed, and we strained our eyes as soon as
there was light enough to make them out from the car windows.  But beyond some
wild pig and hartebeest, and a few of the smaller antelopes, nothing could be
discerned upon the pastures or among the tree-clumps.  Perhaps the creatures
have begun to learn that the railroad brings their enemies, and keep far away
from it.  A year after our visit the murrain, to which I have already
referred, appeared in this region, and has now wrought fearful devastation
among the wild animals, especially the buffaloes.

     The railway now runs all the way from Chimoyo to the port of Beira, but
in October, 1895, came to an end at a place called Fontesvilla, on the Pungwe
River, near the highest point to which the tide rises.  We had therefore to
take to the river in order to reach Beira, where a German steamer was timed to
call two days later; and our friends in Mashonaland had prepared us to expect
some disagreeable experiences on the river, warning us not to assume that
twelve or fourteen hours would be enough, even in a steamer, to accomplish the
fifty miles of navigation that lie between Fontesvilla and the sea.  They had
been specially insistent that we should remain in Fontesvilla itself no longer
than was absolutely necessary; for Fontesvilla has the reputation of being the
most unhealthy spot in all this unhealthy country.  We were told that the
preceding year had been a salubrious one, for only forty-two per cent. of the
European residents had died.  There may have been some element of exaggeration
in these figures, but the truth they were intended to convey is beyond
dispute; and the bright young assistant superintendent of the railroad was
mentioned, with evident wonder, as the only person who had been more than
three months in the place without a bad attack of fever.  Fontesvilla has not
the externals of a charnel-house.  It consists of seven or eight scattered
frame houses, with roofs of corrugated iron, set in a dull, featureless flat
on the banks of a muddy river.  The air is sultry and depressing, but has not
that foul swamp smell with which Poti, on the Black Sea, reeks, the most
malarious spot I had ever before visited.  Nor was there much stagnant water
visible; indeed, the ground seemed dry, though there are marshes hidden among
the woods on the other side of the river.  As neither of the steamers that ply
on the Pungwe could come up at neap tides, and with the stream low, - for the
rains had not yet set in, - the young superintendent (to whose friendly help
we were much beholden) had bespoken a rowboat to come up for us from the lower
part of the river. After waiting from eight till half-past ten o'clock for
this boat, we began to fear it had failed us, and, hastily engaging a small
two-oared one that lay by the bank, set off in it down the stream.
Fortunately, after two and a half miles the other boat, a heavy old tub, was
seen slowly making her way upward, having on board the captain of the little
steam-launch, the launch herself being obliged to remain much lower down the
river.  We transferred ourselves and our effects to this boat, and floated
gaily down, thinking our troubles over.

     The Pungwe is here about one hundred yards wide, but very shallow, and
with its water so turbid that we could not see the bottom where it was more
than two feet below the surface.  It was noon; the breeze had dropped, and the
sun was so strong that we gladly took refuge in the little cabin, or rather
covered box, - a sort of hen-coop, - at the stern. The stream and the tide
were with us, and we had four native rowers, but our craft was so heavy that
we accomplished barely two miles an hour.  As the channel grew wider and the
current spread itself hither and thither over sand-banks, the bed became more
shallow, and from time to time we grounded.  When this happened, the native
rowers jumped into the water and pushed or pulled the boat along.  The farther
down we went, and the more the river widened, so much the more often did we
take the bottom, and the harder did we find it to get afloat again.  Twelve
miles below Fontesvilla, a river called the Bigimiti comes in on the right,
and at its mouth we took on board a bold young English sportsman with the skin
of a huge lion.  Below the confluence, where a maze of sand-banks encumbers
the channel, we encountered a strong easterly breeze.  The big clumsy boat
made scarcely any way against it, and stuck upon the sand so often that the
Kafirs, who certainly worked with a will, were more than half the time in the
water up to their knees, tugging and shoving to get her off. Meanwhile the
tide, what there was of it, was ebbing fast, and the captain admitted that if
we did not get across these shoals within half an hour we should certainly lie
fast upon them till next morning at least, and how much longer no one could
tell.  It was not a pleasant prospect, for we had no food except some biscuits
and a tin of cocoa, and a night on the Pungwe, with pestiferous swamps all
round, meant almost certainly an attack of fever.  Nothing, however, could be
done beyond what the captain and the Kafirs were doing, so that suspense was
weighted by no sense of personal responsibility.  We moved alternately from
stern to bow, and back from bow to stern, to lighten the boat at one end or
the other, and looked to windward to see from the sharp curl of the waves
whether the gusts which stopped our progress were freshening further.
Fortunately they abated.  Just as the captain seemed to be giving up hope -
the only fault we had with him was that his face revealed too plainly his
anxieties - we felt ourselves glide off into a deeper channel; the Kafirs
jumped in and smote the dark-brown current with their oars, and the prospect
of a restful night at Beira rose once more before us.  But our difficulties
were not quite over, for we grounded several times afterward, and progress was
so slow that it seemed very doubtful whether we should find and reach before
dark the little steam-launch that had come up to meet us.

     Ever since my childish imagination had been captivated by the picture of
Afric's sunny fountains rolling down their golden sand, the idea of traversing
a tropical forest on the bosom of a great African river had retained its
fascination.  Here at last was the reality, and what a dreary reality!  The
shallow, muddy stream, broken into many channels, which inclosed low, sandy
islets, had spread to a width of two miles.  The alluvial banks, rising twenty
feet in alternate layers of sand and clay, cut off any view of the country
behind.  All that could be seen was a fringe of thick, low trees, the edge of
the forest that ran back from the river.  Conspicuous among them was the
ill-omened "fever-tree," with its gaunt, bare, ungainly arms and yellow bark -
the tree whose presence indicates a pestilential air.  Here was no luxuriant
variety of form, no wealth of color, no festooned creepers nor brilliant
flowers, but a dull and sad monotony, as we doubled point after point and saw
reach after reach of the featureless stream spread out before us.  Among the
trees not a bird was to be seen or heard; few even fluttered on the bosom of
the river.  We watched for crocodiles sunning themselves on the sand-spits,
and once or twice thought we saw them some two hundred yards away, but they
had always disappeared as we drew nearer.  The beast is quick to take alarm at
the slightest noise, and not only the paddles of a steamer, but even the plash
of oars, will drive him into the water.  For his coyness we were partly
consoled by the gambols of the river-horses.  All round the boat these
creatures were popping up their huge snouts and shoulders, splashing about,
and then plunging again into the swirling water. Fortunately none rose quite
close to us, for the hippopotamus, even if he means no mischief, may easily
upset a boat when he comes up under it, and may be induced by curiosity to
submerge it with one bite of his strong jaws, in which case the passengers are
likely to have fuller opportunities than they desire of becoming acquainted
with the crocodiles.

     Among such sights the sultry afternoon wore itself slowly into night, and
just as dark fell - it falls suddenly like a curtain in these latitudes - we
joyfully descried the steam-launch waiting for us behind a sandy point.  Once
embarked on her, we made better speed through the night.  It was cloudy, with
a struggling moon, which just showed us a labyrinth of flat, densely wooded
isles, their margins fringed with mangrove-trees.  Exhausted by a journey of
more than thirty hours without sleep, we were now so drowsy as to be in
constant danger of falling off the tiny launch, which had neither seats nor
bulwarks, and even the captain's strong tea failed to rouse us.  Everything
seemed like a dream - this lonely African river, with the faint moonlight
glimmering here and there upon its dark bosom, while the tree-tops upon
untrodden islets flitted past in a slow, funereal procession, befitting a land
of silence and death.

     At last, when it was now well past midnight, a few lights were seen in
the distance, and presently we were at Beira.  As we touched the shore we were
told that the German steamer had already arrived, two days before her time,
and was to start in the morning at ten o'clock.  So we made straight for her,
and next day at noon sailed for Delagoa Bay.

     Beira stands on a sand-spit between the ocean and the estuary of the
Pungwe River.  Though the swamps come close up to it, the town itself is
tolerably healthy at all seasons, because the strong easterly breeze blows
from the sea three days out of four.  Six years ago there was hardly even a
house, and its quick growth is entirely due to its having been discovered to
possess the best harbor on the coast, and to be therefore the fittest point of
departure from the sea for the territories of the British South Africa
Company.

     In old days the chief Portuguese settlement on this part of the coast was
at Sofala, a few miles farther to the south, which had been visited by Vasco
da Gama in A. D. 1502, and where the Portuguese built a fort in 1505.  It was
then an Arab town, and famous as the place whence most of the gold brought
down from the interior was exported.  Now it has shrunk to insignificance, and
Beira will probably become the most important haven on the coast between
Delagoa Bay, to the south, and Dar-es-Salaam, the headquarters of German
administration, to the north.  The anchorage in the estuary behind the
sand-spit is spacious and sheltered, and the outrush of the tide from the
large estuary keeps down, by its constant scour, accumulations of sand upon
the bar.  The rise of tide at this part of the coast, from which Madagascar is
only four hundred miles distant, is twenty-two feet, and the channel of
approach, though narrow and winding (for the coast is shallow and there are
shoals for six or eight miles out), is tolerably well buoyed and not really
difficult.  The railway terminus is being erected at a point within the harbor
where the sand-spit joins the mainland, and here a quay is also being built
for the discharge of goods direct to the trucks.

     The journey which I have described, with all its difficulties, first on
the river between Beira and Fontesvilla, and then again on the track between
Chimoyo and Mtali, will soon be a thing of the past.  Early in 1896 the
railway was opened from Fontesvilla to Beira, so that the tedious and
vexatiously uncertain voyage up or down the Pungwe River is now superseded by
a more swift if less exciting form of travel.  At the other end of the
railroad the permanent way is being rapidly laid from Chimoyo to Mtali, so
that trains will probably be running all the way from the sea to Mtali by the
end of 1897, and to Fort Salisbury before the end of the century.  It will
then be possible to go from Beira to Mtali in fourteen or sixteen hours, to
Fort Salisbury in twenty or twenty-four.  Should the resources of Mashonaland
turn out within the next few years to be what its more sanguine inhabitants
assert, its progress will be enormously accelerated by this line, which will
give a far shorter access to South Central Africa than can be had by the rival
lines that start from Cape Town, from Durban, and from Delagoa Bay.