Old Cape Town just the same as ever. Same lounging warders and convicts digging docks. Malays and snoek fish everywhere. Adderley Street improved with extra turreted, verandahed buildings. The Castle venerable, low, and poky as of yore, and—of course—under repair. Short visits there, to Government House, and to that beautiful old Dutch house in Strand Street where one learns the Dutch side of the questions of the day.
By nine o’clock at night we’re all aboard the train for Mafeking—a thousand well–remembered faces seem to be there on the platform cheering us away as we steam out into the night.
Hard beds, cold night, bumpity flap we go.
20th May.—Rattling along over the Karoo. Stony plains with frequent stony hills and mountains. The clearest atmosphere, and air like draughts of fresh spring water. Up hill, down dale—the train crawling up at foot’s pace with heart–breaking, laboured panting of the engine, then down the other side rattling and swaying about like a runaway coster’s barrow.
Three times in the day we stop at wayside stations where there’s a kind of table d’hôtel prepared—much as it is in India, only less so.
Very little life along the line, beyond an occasional waggon with its lengthy team of oxen or of donkeys, creeping at its very slowest pace along the plain.
Our own pace, however, is not much to boast about; we don’t go fast, and often stop to execute repairs.
The scenery remains much the same, except that the stony plain gives place to white grass veldt sparsely dotted with little thorn–bushes—its only beauty (and that is matchless of its kind) the wonderful colours of the distant hills, especially at dawn or sunset.
We pass by little groups of iron–roofed houses—sanatoria where people come to live—or die—whose lungs are gone.
Kimberley. Miles of mineheads, mounds of refuse, town of tin houses and dust, a filthy refreshment room,—and on we go.