Howick, March 13.
It is difficult to imagine that so cool and charming a spot as this is only a dozen miles from Maritzburg, of which one gets so tired. It must be acknowledged that each mile might fairly count for six English ones if the difficulty of getting over it were reckoned. The journey occupied three hours of a really beautiful afternoon, which had the first crisp freshness of autumn in its balmy breath, and the road climbed a series of hills, with, from the top of each, a wide and charming prospect. We traveled in a sort of double dog-cart of a solidity and strength of construction which filled me with amazement until I saw the nature of the ground it had to go over. Then I was fain to confess it might have been—if such were possible—twice as strong with advantage, for in spite of care and an exceeding slow pace we bent our axles. This road is actually the first stage of the great overland journey to the diamond-fields, and it is difficult to imagine how there can be any transport service at all in the face of such difficulties. I have said so much about bad roads already that I feel more than half ashamed to dilate upon this one; yet roads, next to servants, are the standing grievance of Natal. To see a road-party at work—and you must bear in mind that thousands are spent annually on roads—is to understand in a great measure how so many miles come to be mere quagmires and pitfalls for man and beast. A few tents by the roadside here and there, a little group of lazy, three-parts-naked Kafirs, a white man in command who probably knows as little of the first principles of roadmaking as his dog, and a feeble scratching up of the surrounding mud, transferring it from one hole to the other,—that is roadmaking in Natal, so far as it has presented itself to me. On this particular route the fixed idea of the road-parties—of which we passed three—was to dig a broad, wide ditch a couple of feet below the level of the surrounding country, and to pick up the earth all over it, so that the first shower of rain might turn it into a hopeless, sticky mass of mud. As for any idea of making the middle of the road higher than the sides, that appears to be considered a preposterous one, and is not, at all events, acted upon in any place I have seen. It was useless to think of availing ourselves of the ditch, for the mud looked too serious after last night’s heavy rain; so we kept to an older track, where we bumped in and out of holes in a surprising and bruising fashion. It took four tolerably stout and large horses to get us along at all; and if they had not been steadily and carefully driven, we should have been still more black and blue and stiff and aching than we were. I wonder if you will believe me when I say that I was assured that many of the holes were six feet deep? I don’t think our wheels went into any hole more than three feet below the rough surface. I found, however, that the boulders were worse than the holes. One goes, to a certain extent, quietly in and out of a hole, but the wheel slips very suddenly off the top of a high boulder, and comes to the ground with a cruel jerk. There was plenty of rock in the hillside, so every now and then the holes would be filled up by boulders, and we crawled for some yards over ground which had the effect of an exceedingly rough wall having tumbled down over it. If one could imagine Mr. MacAdam’s idea carried out in Brobdingnag, one would have some faint notion of the gigantic proportions of the hardening material on that road.
It was—as is often the case where an almost tropical sun draws up the moisture from the earth—a misty evening, and the distant view was too vague and vaporous to leave any distinct picture on my memory. Round Howick itself are several little plantations in the clefts of the nearest downs, and each plantation shelters a little farm or homestead. We can only just discern in more distant hollows deep blue-black shadows made by patches of real native forest, the first I have seen; but close at hand the park-like country is absolutely bare of timber save for these sheltering groups of gum trees, beneath whose protection other trees can take root and flourish. Gum trees seem the nurses of all vegetation in a colony: they drain a marshy soil and make it fit for a human dwelling-place wherever they grow. There you see also willows with their delicate tender leaves, and sentinel poplars whose lightly-poised foliage keeps up a cool rustle always. But now the road is getting a trifle better, and we are beginning to drop down hill. Hitherto it has been all stiff collar-work, and we have climbed a thousand feet or more above Maritzburg. It is closing in quite a cold evening, welcome to our sun-baked energies, as we drive across quite an imposing bridge (as well it may be, for it cost a good many thousand pounds) which spans the Umgeni River, and so round a sharp turn and up a steepish hill to where the hotel stands amid sheltering trees and a beautiful undergrowth of ferns and arum lilies. Howick appears to be all hotel, for two have already been built, and a third is in progress. A small store and a pretty wee church are all the other component parts of the place. Our hotel is delightful, with an enchanting view of the Umgeni widening out as it approaches the broad cliff from which it leaps a few hundred yards farther on.
Now, ever since I arrived in Natal I have been pining to see a real mountain and a real river—not a big hill or a capricious spruit, sometimes a ditch and sometimes a lake, but a respectable river, too deep to be muddy. Here it is before me at last, the splendid Umgeni, curving among the hills, wide and tranquil, yet with a rushing sound suggestive of its immense volume. We can’t waste a moment in-doors: not even the really nice fresh butter—and what a treat that is you must taste Maritzburg butter to understand—nor the warm tea can detain us for long. We snatch up our shawls and run out in the gloaming to follow the river’s sound and find out the spot where it leaps down. It is not difficult, once we are in the open air, to decide in which direction we must go, and for once we brave ticks, and even snakes, and go straight across country through the long grass. There it is. Quite suddenly we have come upon it, so beautiful in its simplicity and grandeur, no ripple or break to confuse the eye and take away the sense of unity and consolidation. The river widens, and yet hurries, gathering up strength and volume until it reaches that great cliff of iron-stone. You could drop a plumb-line over it, so absolutely straight is it for three hundred and fifty feet. I have seen other waterfalls in other parts of the world, but I never saw anything much more imposing than this great perpendicular sheet of water broken into a cloud of spray and foam so soon as it touches the deep, silent basin below. The water is discolored where it flings itself over the cliff, and there are tinges and stains of murky yellow on it there, but the spray which rises up from below is purer and whiter than driven snow, and keeps a great bank of lycopodium moss at the foot of the cliff, over which it is driven by every breath of air, fresh and young and vividly green. Many rare ferns and fantastic bushes droop on either side of the great fall—droop as if they too were giddy with the noise of the water rushing past them, and were going to fling themselves into the dark pools below. But kindly Nature holds them back, for she needs the contrast of branch and stem to give effect to the purity of the falling water. Just one last gleam of reflected sunlight gilded the water’s edge where it dashed over the cliff, and a pale crescent moon hung low over it in a soft “daffodil sky.” It was all ineffably beautiful and poetic, and the roar of the falling river seemed only to bring out with greater intensity the absolute silence of the desolate spot and the starlight hour.