Will you believe me when I declare that in spite of all these weary weeks of drought, in spite of this intense blaze of burning sunshine all through the thirsty day, the long stretches of the blackened country are showing tender green shoots round the stumps of the old rank grass burned away long ago? It seems little short of a miracle when one sees the baked earth, hard as a granite cliff, dry as a last year’s bone, and through its parched, pulverized surface little clumps of trefoil are springing everywhere, and young blades of grass. On the mulberry trees, too, the buttons have burst into tufts of dainty leaves, which assert themselves more and more every day, and herald that wealth of freshest greenery in which Natal was clad over hill and dale when first I saw her last November. Then I could not take in that the smiling emerald downs which stretched around me could ever be the arid desolate wasteland they now appear; and now I can scarcely summon up faith enough to believe in the miracle of the spring resurrection close at hand, of which these few lonely leaves and blades are the sign and token.
Yes, Jim’s English is very droll—all the more so for his anxiety to practice it, in spite of his protestations to the contrary. Jim is a great meteorologist, unlike the majority of Kafirs, from whom you can extract no opinion whatever. They say the rain-doctor is the proper person to determine whether it is going to be fair or foul weather. I have asked Charlie whether it was going to rain when the heavy clouds have been almost over our heads, just to hear what he would say; and Charlie has answered with Turkish fatalism, “Oh, ma’, I doan know: if it like to rain, it will, but if it don’t, it won’t.” Now, Jim does proffer an opinion, expressed by a good deal of pantomime, and Jim is quite as often right as most weather-prophets. Jim studies the skies on account of getting and keeping his wood-heap dry, and prides himself on neat stacks of chopped-up fuel. I gave Jim an orange the other day, and he took it in the graceful Kafir fashion with both hands, and burst forth into all his English at once: “Oh, danks, ma’: inkosa-casa vezy kind new face, vezy. Jim no sheeky: oh yaas, all lite!” His meaning can only dimly be guessed at, especially about the new face. I wish with all my heart I could get a new face, for this one is much the worse for the South African sun and my inveterate habit of loitering about out of doors whenever I can, and spending most of my waking hours in the verandah.
August 4.
Since I last wrote there has not been much loitering out of doors, nor has any one who could possibly avoid doing so even put his nose outside. The hot zephyr I alluded to three days ago suddenly changed to a furious hot gale, the worst I have ever seen—hotter than a New Zealand nor’-wester, and as heavy as a hurricane. The clouds of dust baffle description. The direction, too, from whence it came must also have changed, for a sort of epidemic of low fever is hanging about, and the influenza would be ludicrous from the number of its victims if it were not so disagreeable and so dangerous. All the washermen and washerwomen in the whole place are ill, the entire body of Kafir police is on the sick list, all one’s servants are laid up—Charlie says pathetically, “Too moch plenty cough inside, ma’”—and everybody looks wretched. The “inkos” which one hears in passing are either a hoarse growl or a wheezy whisper. When you consider how absolutely dry the atmosphere must be, it is difficult to imagine how people catch such constant and severe colds as they do here. I am bound to say, however, that except with this influenza a cold does not last so long as it does in England, but I think you catch cold oftener; and the reason is not far to seek. In these hot winds, or out of the broiling midday sun, some visitor rides up from town, and arrives here or elsewhere very hot indeed. Then he comes into a little drawing-room with its thick stone walls and closed, darkened windows, and exclaims, “How delightfully cool you are here!” but in five minutes he is shivering; and the next thing I hear is that he has cold or fever. Yet what is one to do? I have to keep in-doors all day: I must have a cool room to sit in; and as long as one has not been taking exercise out of doors, it does no harm.
The gale of hot wind seemed to set the whole place on fire. I should not have thought a tussock had been left anywhere, but every night lately has been made bright as day by the glare of blazing hillsides. Then I leave my readers to imagine the state of a house into which all these fine particles of soot filter through ill-fitting doors and windows, driven by a furious hurricane. The other morning poor little G—— ’s plate of porridge set aside to cool in the dining-room, with every door and window closed, had a layer of black burnt grass on the top in five minutes; and the state of the tablecloth, milk, etc. baffles description. Indeed, one’s life is a life of dusting and scrubbing and cleaning generally, if a house is to be kept even tolerably tidy in these parts.
I forget if I have ever told you of the spiders here. They are another sorrow to the careful housewife, spinning webs in every corner, across doorways, filling up spaces beneath tables, flinging their aërial bridges from chair to chair—all in a single night—and regarding glass and china ornaments merely as a nucleus or starting-point for a filmy labyrinth.
August 10.
Every now and then, when I give way to temper and a hot wind combined, and write crossly about the climate, my conscience reproaches me severely with a want of fairness when the weather changes, as it generally does directly, and we have some exquisite days and nights. For instance, directly after I last wrote our first spring showers fell—very coyly, it is true, and almost as if the clouds had forgotten how to dissolve into rain. Still, the very smell of the moist earth was delicious, and ever since that wet night the whole country has been
Growing glorious
Quietly, day by day;