June 15.
We had such a nice Cockney family picnic ten days ago, on Whit-Monday! F—— had been bewailing himself about this holiday beforehand, declaring he should not know what to do with himself, and regretting that holidays had ever been invented, and so on, until I felt that it was absolutely necessary to provide him with some out-door occupation for the day. There was no anxiety about the weather, for it is only too “set fair” all round, and the water shrinks away and the dust increases upon us day by day. But there was an anxiety about where to go and how to get to any place. “Such a bad road!” was the objection raised to every place I proposed, or else it was voted too far. At last all difficulties were met by a suggestion of spending a “happy day” at the falls of the lower Umgeni, only a dozen miles away, and the use of the mule-wagon. Everything was propitious, even to the materials for a cold dinner being handy, and we bundled in ever so many boys, Nurse and myself, and Maria in her brightest cotton frock and literally beaming with smiles, which every now and then broke out into a joyous, childish laugh of pure delight at nothing at all. She came to carry the baby, who loves her better than any one, and who understands Kafir better than English. The great thing was, that everybody had the companions they liked: as I have said, Baby had his Maria, F—— had secured a pleasant friend to ride with him, so as to be independent of the wagon, G—— had his two favorite little schoolfellows, and I—well, I had the luncheon-basket, and that was quite enough for me to think of. I kept remembering spasmodically divers omissions made in the hurry of packing it up; for, like all pleasant parties, it was quite à l’imprévu, and that made me rather anxious. It was really a delicious morning, sunny and yet cool, with everything around looking bright and glowing under the beautiful light. The near hills seemed to fold the little quiet town in soft round curves melting and blending into each other, whilst the ever-rising and more distant outlines showed exquisite indigo shadows and bold relief of purple and brown. The greenery of spring and summer is all parched and dried away now, but the red African soil takes in the distance warm hues and tints which make up for the delicate coloring of young grass. Here and there, as it glows beneath the sun and a slow-sailing cloud casts a shadow, it changes from its own rich indescribable color to the purple of a heather-covered Scotch moor, but while one looks the cloud has passed away, the violet tints die out, and it is again a bare red hillside which lies before you. A steep hillside, too, for the poor mules, but they breast it bravely at a jog trot, with their jangling bells and patient bowed heads, and we are soon at the top, looking down on the clouds of our own dust. The wind—or rather the soft air, for it is hardly a wind—blows straight in our faces as we trot on toward the south-west, and it drives the mass of finely-powdered dust raised by the heels of the six mules far behind us, to our great contentment and comfort. The two gentlemen on horseback are fain to keep clear of us and our dust, and to take a short cut whenever they can get off the highroad, which in this case and at this time of year is really a very good one. Inside the wagon, under the high hood, it is deliciously cool, but the boys are in such tearing spirits that I don’t know what to do with them. Every now and then, when we are going up hill, they jump out of the wagon and search the hillside for a yellow flower, a sort of everlasting, out of the petals of which they extemporize shrill whistles; and when their invention in this line falls short, Maria steps in with a fresh suggestion. They make fearful pipes of reeds, they chirp like the grasshoppers, they all chatter and laugh together like so many magpies. When I am quite at my wits’ end I produce buns, and these keep them quiet for full five minutes, but not longer.
At last, after two hours’ steady up-hill pulling on the part of the mules, we have reached the great plateau from which the Umgeni takes its second leap, the first being at Howick. There, the sight of the great river rolling wide and swift between its high banks keeps the boys quiet with surprise and delight for a short space, and before they have found their tongues again the wagon has noisily crossed a resounding wooden bridge and drawn up at the door of an inn. Here the mules find rest and shelter, as well as their Hottentot drivers, whilst we are only beginning our day’s work. As for the boys, their whole souls are absorbed in their fishing-rods: they grudge the idea of wasting time in eating dinner, and stipulate earnestly that they may be allowed to “eat fast.” We find and charter a couple of tall Kafirs to carry the provision-baskets; F—— and his companion take careful and tender charge each of a bottle of beer; Maria shoulders the baby; I cling to my little teapot; Nurse seizes a bottle of milk, and away we all go down the dusty road again, over the bridge (the boys don’t want to go a yard farther, for they see some Kafirs fishing below), across a burnt-up meadow, through scrub of terrible thorniness, and so on, guided by the rush and roar of the falling water, to our dining-room among the great boulders beneath the shade of the chief cascade. Unlike the one grand, concentrated leap of the river we saw at Howick, here it tumbles in a dozen places over a wide semicircular ledge of basalt. It is no joke to any one except the boys—who seem to enjoy tumbling about and grazing their elbows and chins—getting over the wet, slippery rocks which have to be crossed to get to the place we want. I tremble for the milk and the beer, and the teapot and I slip down repeatedly, but I am under no apprehension about Maria and the baby, for she plants her broad, big, bare feet firmly on the rocks, and steps over their wet, slippery surface with the ease and grace of a stout gazelle. Once, and once only, is she in danger, but it is because she is laughing so immoderately at the baby’s suggestion, made in lisping Kafir when he first caught sight of the waterfall, that we should all have a bath there and then.
The falls are not in their fullest splendor to-day, for this is the dry season, and even the great Umgeni acknowledges the drain of burning sunshine day after day, and is rather more economical in her display of tumbling water and iridescent spray. Still, all is very beautiful, and in spite of our hunger—for we are all wellnigh ravenous—we climb various rocks of vantage to see the fine semicircle of cascades gleaming white among tufts of green scrub and massive boulders. In the wet season, of course, much that we see now of rock and tree is hidden by the greater volume of water, but they add greatly to the sylvan beauty of the fair scene. It is quite cold in the shade, but we have no choice, for where the sun shines invitingly there is not a foot of level rock and not an inch of soft white sand like the floor of our dining-room. Such an indignant twitter as the birds raise, hardly to be pacified by crumbs and scraps of the rapidly-vanishing bread and meat, salad and pudding! But the days are so short now that we cannot spare ourselves half the time we want either to eat or rest, or to linger and listen to the great monotonous roar of falling water, so agitating at first, so soothing after a little while. The boys have bolted their dinner, plunged their heads and hands under a tiny tricklet close by, and are off to the shallows beneath the bridge, where the river runs wide and low, where geese are cackling on the boulders, fish leaping in the pools, and Kafir lads laughing and splashing on the brink. We leave Baby and his nurse in charge of the birds’ dinner until the men return for the lightened baskets, and we three “grown-ups” start for a sharp scramble up the face of the cliff, over the bed of a dry watercourse, to look at the wonderful expanse of the great river coming down from the purple hills on the horizon, sweeping across the vast, almost level, plain in a magnificent tranquil curve, wide as an inland lake, until it falls abruptly over the precipice before it. Scarcely a ripple on the calm surface, scarcely a quickening of its steady, tranquil flow, and yet it has gone, dropped clean out of sight, and that monotonous roar is the noise of its fall. I should like to see it in summer, when its stately progress is quickened and its limpid waters stained by the overflow of countless lesser streams into its broad bosom, and when its banks are fringed with tufts of tall white arum lilies—now only green folded leaves, shrunken as close to the water’s edge as they can get—and when the carpet of violets beneath our feet is a sheet of blossom flecked with gayer flowers all over this great spreading veldt. To-day the wish of my heart, of all our hearts, is for a canoe apiece. Oh for the days of fairy thievery, to be able to swoop down upon Mr. Searle’s yard and snatch up three perfect little canoes, paddles, sails, waterproof aprons and all, and put them down over there by that clump of lilies and crimson bushes! What a race we could have for clear eight miles up that shining reach, between banks which are never nearer than sixty or seventy feet to each other, and where the river is as smooth as glass, and free from let or hindrance to a canoe for all that distance! But, alas! there are neither roguish fairies nor stolen canoes to be seen—nothing except one’s rough-and-ready fishing-rod and the everlasting mealie-meal worked into a paste for bait. We are too impatient to give it a fair trial, although the fish are leaping all around, for already the sun is traveling fast toward those high western hills, and when once he gets behind the tallest of the peaks darkness will be upon us in five minutes. We should be much more careful of our minutes even, did there not chance to be an early moon, already a silver disk in yonder bright blue sky. The homeward path is longer and easier, and leads us more circuitously back to the bridge, beneath which I am horrified to find G—— and his friends, their fishing-rods and one small fish on the bank, disporting themselves in the water, with nothing on save their hats. G—— is not at all dismayed at my shrill reproaches to him from the high bridge above, but suggests that I should throw him down my pocket handkerchief for a towel, and promises to dress and come up to the house directly. So I, with the thoughts of my tea in my mind—for we have not been able to have a fire at the falls—hurry up to the inn, and have time for a look round before the boys are ready. It is all so odd—such a strange jumble, such a thorough example of the queer upside-down fashion of colonizing which reigns here—that I cannot help describing it. A fairly good, straggling house with sufficiently good furniture, and plenty of it, and an apparent abundance of good glass and crockery. A sort of bar also, with substantial array of bottles and tins of biscuits and preserved meats and pickles of all sorts and kinds. But what I want you to bear in mind is, that all this came from England, and has finally been brought up here, nearly seventy miles from the coast, at an enormous trouble and expense. There are several young white people about the place, but a person of that class in Natal is too fine to work, and in five minutes I hear fifty complaints of want of labor and of the idleness of the Kafirs. There is no garden, no poultry-yard, no dairy. Here, with the means of irrigation at their very doors, with the possibility of food for cattle all the year round at the cost of a little personal trouble, there is neither a drop of milk nor an ounce of butter to be had. Nor an egg: “The fowls don’t do so very well.” I should think not, with such accommodation as they have in the way of water and food. For more than twenty years that house has stood there, a generation has grown up around it and in it, and yet it might as well have been built last year for all the signs of a homestead about it. There is somewhere a mealie-patch, and perhaps a few acres of green forage, and that is all. Now, in Australia or New Zealand, in a more rigorous climate, under far greater disadvantages, the dwellers in that house would have had farmyard and grain-fields, garden and poultry-yard, about them in five years, and all the necessary labor would have been performed by the master and mistress and their sons and daughters. Here they all sit in-doors, listless and discontented, grumbling because the Kafirs won’t come and work for them. I can’t make it out, and I confess I long to give all this sort of colonists a good shaking, and take away every single Kafir from them. I am sure they would get on a thousand times better. The only thing is, it is too late to shake energy and thrift into elderly or already grown-up people. They get on very well as it is, they say, and make money, which is all they care for, having no pride in neatness or order, and setting no value on the good opinion of others. They can sell their beer and pickles and tins of meat and milk at double and treble what they cost; and that is less fatiguing than digging and fencing and churning. So the tea has no milk and the bread no butter where twenty years ago cows were somewhere about five shillings apiece, and we get on as well as we can without them; but I long, up to the very last, to shake them all round, especially the fat, pallid young people. Fortunately for Her Majesty’s peace, I refrain from this expression of my opinion, and get myself and all my boys into the mule-wagon, and so off again, jogging homeward before the sun has dipped behind that great blue hill. Long ere we have gone halfway the daylight has all died away, and the boys find fresh cause for shouts of delight at the fantastic shadows the moon casts as she glides in and out of her cloud-palaces.
It would have been an enchanting drive home, wrapped up to the chin as we all were, except for the dust. What air there was came from behind us, from the same point as it had blown in the morning, but now we carried the dust along with us, and were powdered snow-white by it. Every hundred yards or so the drivers put on the brake and whistled to the mules to stop. They did not mind losing sight altogether of the leaders in a dense cloud of dust, nor even of the next pair, but when the wheelers were completely blotted out by the thick stirred-up mass of fine dust, then they thought it high time to pause and let it blow past us. But all this stopping made the return journey rather long and tedious, and all the curly little heads were nodding on our shoulders, only rousing up with a flicker of the day’s animation when we came to where a grass-fire was sweeping over the veldt, and our road a dusty but wide and safe barrier against the sheets of crackling flame. All along the horizon these blazing belts showed brightly against the deep twilight sky, sometimes racing up the hills, again lighting up the valleys with yellow belt and circle of smoke and fire, but everywhere weird and picturesque beyond the power of words to tell.
I noticed during that drive what I have so often observed out here before—the curious layers of cold air. Sometimes we felt our wraps quite oppressive: generally, this was when we were at the top of a hill, or even climbing up it: then, when we were crossing a valley or a narrow ravine, we seemed to drive into an ice-cold region where we shivered beneath our furs; and then again in five minutes the air would once more be soft and balmy—crisp and bracing indeed, but many degrees warmer than those narrow arctic belts here and there.
