After remaining three weeks in Cape Town, we found that the changes of temperature caused by the south-easters retarded Frank’s recovery, and we hastened our departure for the upland region.
Chapter Eight.
Pearls and diamonds are words that have a charm in themselves. Not only do they represent exceedingly beautiful things, but the words themselves are pretty. The diamond fields of South Africa, the “ninth wonder of the world,” lay within a few days’ journey of us in the interior of the country.
We left the Royal Hotel, with its attentive landlord and lady, one hot morning late in December, and boarded the train that would take us up into the country about three hundred miles, where the coach would receive us and carry us on to Kimberley, the diamond fields. The railroad was well constructed, and passed over mountains with steep grades, through wild scenery, one thousand feet above the level of the sea.
As we neared “Beaufort” the scenery began to change gradually, and before night the view from the car windows presented a scorched desert-like prairie, with not a particle of vegetation except parched little bushes resembling the sage brush of our Western plains.
The horizon was bounded on all sides by ranges of forbidding mountains, which feature is one marked characteristic of African scenery generally, there being no spot, we believe, in the country where mountains are not seen on every side. Our car was provided with a primitive contrivance for sleeping, consisting of a kind of hammock which was stowed away under the seat during the day and at night was adjusted into slots in the wall of the car; drawing the blinds and shading the lamp at the top of the car with its own little curtain, we laid ourselves down to sleep. In the morning the same prospect met our view that we had bidden good-night to the evening before, and the prospect continued the same until we reached Beaufort. About nine o’clock we stopped at a way-station for breakfast; then on again all day we journeyed through the same deserted country, which is called the “Karoo.” Nothing was growing on it but the monotonous bush, and there was not a house in sight; by midday our eyes ached from looking so long at the same objects. We might have been crossing the Great Sahara Desert. At five o’clock in the evening the train, which had kept up one tantalising “dawdle” all day, began to slacken speed and blow the whistle, and we almost hoped that we were about to have an accident or a break-down, or anything, indeed, to break the dismal monotony. But the locomotive only slackened its speed to a crawl and puffed up with great importance to a low shed with the word “Booking Office” painted over the door. We found we had arrived in Beaufort, which proved to be a pretty village with two or three hotels.
