“Trek—Hamba—ke!” cried the native driver, raising his voice in a wild long-drawn yell. “Englaand—Scotland—Mof—Bokvel—Kwaaiman—Tre-ek!”
The long whip cracked like pistol shots, again and again. As the driver ran through the whole gamut of names, each ox instinctively started forward at the sound of its own, and the ponderous, creaking, loaded-up structure rolled heavily forward. Other waggons stood outspanned along the flat, but mostly deserted, for their owners preferred the more genial atmosphere of the hotel bar, and the native servants in charge had all foregathered at one fire.
“Like to ride, eh? or would you rather walk?” said Dawes, lighting his pipe. “Maybe, though, you’ll find it a bit jolty riding, at first. It’s a fine night, though.”
Gerard answered that they would rather walk; and, indeed, such locomotion was infinitely preferable to the slow rumbling roll of the waggon, crawling along at just under three miles per hour. And the night was fine indeed. The air was deliciously cool, the dim outline of the rolling downs was just visible in the light of the myriad shining stars which spangled the heavens in all the lavish brilliance of their tropical beauty. Here and there a grass fire glowed redly in the distance. Now and again the weird cry of some strange bird or beast arose from the surrounding veldt, and this, with the creaking ramble of the waggon, the deep bass of the native voices, chatting in their own tongue, made our two English lads realise that they were indeed in Africa at last. There was a glorious sense of freedom and exhilaration in the very novelty of the surroundings.
“Well, this is awfully jolly!” pronounced Gerard, looking round.
“Eh! Think so, do you?” said John Dawes. “How would you like to be a transport-rider yourself?”
“I believe I’d like nothing better,” came the prompt reply. “It must be the jolliest, healthiest life in the world.”
“So?” said the other, with a dry chuckle. “Especially when it’s been raining for three days, and the road is one big mudhole, when your waggon’s stuck wheel-deep, and no sooner do you dig it out than in goes another wheel. Why, I’ve been stuck that way, coming over the Berg”—the speaker meant the Drakensberg—“and haven’t made a dozen miles in a fortnight. And cold, too! Why, for a week at a time I’ve not known what it was to have a dry stitch on me, and the rain wouldn’t allow you to light a fire. Jolly healthy life that, eh?”
“Cold!” broke from both the listeners, in astonishment. “Is it ever cold here?”
“Isn’t it? You just wait till you get away from this steaming old sponge of a coast belt. Why, you get snow on the Berg, yards deep. I’ve known fellows lose three full spans of oxen at a time, through an unexpected fall of snow. Well, that’s one of the sides of transport-riding. Another is when there hasn’t been rain for months, and the veldt’s as bare as the skull of a bald-headed man. Then you may crawl along, choking with dust, mile after mile, day after day, the road strewn like a paper-chase, with the bones of oxen which have dropped in the yoke or been turned adrift to die, too weak to go any further—and every water-hole you come to nothing but a beastly mess of pea-soup mud, lucky even if there isn’t a dead dog in the middle of it. My word for it, you get sick of the endless blue of the sky and the red-brown of the veldt, of the poor devils of oxen, staggering along with their tongues out—walking skeletons—creeping their six miles a day, and sometimes not that. You get sick of your own very life itself.”