The sports of Africa are excellent as remedies against attacks of ennui. Should any gentleman feel that he has finished everything in Europe, and is disposed for sport and excitement, let him at once give, up white kids and patents, and take to skin shoes and leather breeches; lay out a couple of hundreds in rifles, saddles, and powder, and start for the wilds of South Africa. Thirty days to Australia is now talked about, therefore twenty to the Cape ought to be work easy enough. That man must be composed of strange stuff who does not find a new pleasure in stalking through tropical forests, well stocked with elephants and other large game; or in riding over plains sprinkled with thousands of magnificent antelopes; in dodging the charge of an angry rhinoceros; or escaping the rush of a troop of elephants.
There will be the excitement of midnight hazard, for ivory is plentiful in Africa, although only in the rough at present, while lions’ teeth may be looked upon as the “bones,” and are nearly as fatal. And if the traveller is not wide awake, the lion will carry off the stakes to a certainty.
A man who has passed through an African shooting campaign, will find that his health is improved; that he is better able to help himself, has a greater trust in his natural gifts, and that trifles cease to annoy him. He will return to England without having lost much of his taste for his native sports. He will enter fully into a five-and-thirty minutes’ run across a country at a pace that weeds the mob, or will take his quiet station near the rippling trout-stream, with just the same gusto as before his South-African tour.
My parting advice to all sportsmen is—“Try a shooting trip for a year in the bush, and on the plains of South Africa, the true fairy-land of sport.”
Appendix.
The Kaffir words given below may be useful to enable some visitor to South Africa to make known to the Kaffirs a few of his wants.
I will not vouch for the correctness of the grammar of which I have made use, but the Kaffirs will understand what may be required from even these sentences.
Each word ought to be pronounced as it is written, the last syllable but one being always rested on longer than the others. The a, e, and i, are pronounced as in French. The plural is in general formed by prefixing ama, and dropping in some cases the first syllable; as, indoda, a man; amadoda, men; ihashi, a horse; amahaski, horses. The numerals are more easily explained by holding up the fingers,—shumi being ten; amashumi, tens. Thirty would be explained as tens, three, amashumi m’tatu, or by opening and shutting the hands three times.