Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

Even on the insect life the exceptional conditions of the Karoo have a marked effect. Imitative colouring is more common here than elsewhere; thus, one insect is so like the white pebbles near which it is always found, that once dropped it cannot easily be again found; another large square insect with hardly any power of flight protects itself by lying motionless on red stones, which it so exactly resembles in colour, having even the rough cleavage marks upon it, that it is impossible to detect it, though you know it to be there; hardly any insect or reptile exists without imitative colouring.

To see the Karoo rightly one should saddle one's horse and ride away from some solitary farm-house. For twenty miles you may ride without seeing a living thing, nor passing even a herd of sheep or goats, or a korhaan or mierkat. At midday you off-saddle in a narrow plain between two low hills, that widen out at the further end into a wider plain, from which rise two conical, solitary, flat-topped hills; and the horizon is bounded by a purple mountain thirty miles off. You put your saddle down beside a milk bush and tie the halter round the horse's knee, that he may go and feed upon the bushes; and you seat yourself beside your saddle on the ground. The milk bush gives little shade, and the midday sun shines hot upon you. In the red sand at your feet the ants are running to and fro, carrying away the crumbs that may have fallen from your saddle-bag; and in the stillness you can hear your horse break the twigs from the bushes as he feeds; he moves further off, and you cannot hear even that. Then you notice on the red sand a little to the right, at the foot of a Karoo bush, a scaly lizard, with his head raised, and his belly palpitating on the red sand, watching you. He is a tiny fellow, three inches long. You move, and he is gone like a flash of light across the sand. By and by the ants have carried away the crumbs, and they too are gone. You sit alone with the sun beating down on you. As the plain lies to-day, so it has lain for long countless ages. Those sharp stones on the edge of the rise to your right, with their points turned to the sky, for how many centuries have they lain there, their edges as sharp and fresh to-day as though they had been broken but yesterday? Those motionless hills; the very knotted Karoo stem at your hand, for how many generations have the leaves sprouted and fallen from its gnarled stalk? The Bushman and the wild buck have crept over the scene; they have gone, and the Englishman with his horse and gun have come; but the plain lies with its sharp stones turned to the sky unchanged through the centuries. Those two stones standing loosely one upon another have stood so for thousands of years, because there was no hand to sever them.

It is not fear one feels, with that clear, blue sky above one; that which creeps over one is not dread. It was amid such scenes as these, amid such motionless, immeasurable silences, that the Oriental mind first framed its noblest conception of the unknown, the "I am that I am" of the Hebrew.

Nor less wonderful is the Karoo at night, when the Milky Way forms a white band across the sky; and you stand alone outside, and see the velvety, blue-black vault rising slowly on one side of the horizon and sinking on the other; and the silence is so intense you seem almost to hear the stars move. Nor is it less wonderful on moonlight nights, when you sit alone on a kopje; and the moon has arisen and the light is pouring over the plain; then even the stones are beautiful; and what you have believed of human love and fellowship—and never grasped—seems all possible to you.

And not less rare is the sunrise, when the hills, which have been purple in the dawn, turn suddenly to gold, and the rays of light shoot fifty miles across the plain and make every drop on the ice-plants sparkle.

Nor less wonderful are the sunsets, when you go out at evening after the day's work. The fierce heat is over; as you walk, a cool breath touches your cheek; you look up and all the hills are turned pink and purple, and a curious light lies on the top of the Karoo bushes; they are all gilded; then it vanishes, and along the horizon there are bars of gold and crimson against a pale emerald sky; and then everything begins to turn grey.

In the Karoo there are also mirages. As you travel along the great plains, such as those between Beaufort and De Aar, you continually see, in hot weather, far off on the horizon, lakes with the sunlight sparkling on the water; there are islands and palm trees and domes and minarets and snow-capped mountains. If you remain for half an hour they do not change. Why the mirage should always take the shape of lakes, islands, and palm trees, is something which science, in giving us its cause, has not accounted for.

There is much talk as to whether the Karoo could not be made more useful agriculturally by the building of great dams, and so be made to supply corn and vegetables in large quantities. This is irrelevant. When all the more readily cultivable places in the world and in South Africa have been brought under the plough, it may pay to turn the Karoo into a garden. The soil is scanty in most parts, sometimes barely covering the rocks. The long droughts, the habitual dryness of the air sucking up all moisture, and the sharp frosts in winter, must make agriculture always difficult, as it is now almost impossible. There are vast tracts covered with sharp stones where it is even difficult for sheep to find a mouthful of pasturage. But the Karoo has a future. It is a sanatorium of the world. It has a climate that is unequalled. It will be visited not only by those seeking recovery from illness, from the moister Zambesi and sub-tropical regions of Africa, but from all parts of the world. The selfish lover of the solitary Karoo may regret it, but the day will come when the inhabitants of the Karoo will cull millions from their dry soil and bare hills, as the inhabitants of the Riviera cull them to-day.

At present the Karoo is inhabited sparsely by Boer and English farmers, the homesteads lying often forty or fifty miles apart; and there are a few small villages, often at distances of more than a hundred miles, inhabited by the descendants of Boers and English.

The early inhabitants of the country were wandering tribes of Bushmen, whose paintings of animals we may still find under the shelving ledge of rocks, and whose arrow-heads of bone and flint may be still picked up at the sources of some spring they frequented. They are now gone, like the game which filled these plains sixty years ago; a few wandering remnants may be found in the extreme north-east, and a few ragged individuals in cast-off European clothing may be seen about the back doors of farm-houses. The whole of the Karoo now forms part of the Cape Colony.