The stay at Sugar-cane Grove lasted a week, which was entirely occupied in sowing millet, wheat, oats and maize. Cereals throve quickly in this soil, which was irrigated from Swan Lake. Mr. Wolston had cut a trench from the western bank of the lake to this spot, and the water spread over the surface of this district by the natural process of finding its own level. As a result of this device, Sugar-cane Grove might be regarded as the richest of the three farms established in the Promised Land.
During this week Jack had plenty of sport. The moment he could be spared, he went off with his dogs. The larder was plentifully stocked with quails, grouse, partridges, and bustards, with peccaries and agoutis. Hyenas had previously been observed in the neighbourhood, but Jack met none, nor yet any other carnivorous animal. It was clear that the wild animals fled before man.
While walking by the side of the lake, Jack, more fortunate than his brother Fritz had been a few years before, got the chance to bowl over an animal the size of a large donkey, with a dark brown coat, a kind of hornless rhinoceros, of the tapir species. It was an anta, and it did not fall to the first shot which the young hunter fired at twenty paces; but just as it was charging at Jack, a second bullet pierced its heart.
At last, in the evening of the 15th of September, all this work was finished. The next day, after the house had been fast closed and the enclosure shut up with a solid railing, the waggon set off towards the north on its way to Prospect Hill, in the neighbourhood of False Hope Point.
The farm was about five miles from that point, which stretches out like a vulture's beak between Nautilus Bay and the open sea. The greater part of the journey lay on a flat plain, where the going was easy. But the plain sloped appreciably as it approached the cliff.
Two hours after the start, beyond a green and rich stretch of country wonderfully refreshed by the rainy season, M. Zermatt, Mr. Wolston, and Jack came to the Monkeys' Wood, which had ceased to deserve that name since those mischievous creatures had disappeared. At the foot of the hill they called a halt.
The sides of Prospect Hill were not really so steep that the buffaloes and the onager could not climb them, by following a zigzag path which wound round them. There was one really strenuous effort to be made, and the waggon was at the top.
After one strenuous effort, the waggon was at the top.