And, with that reflection, the memory of his first glimpse of that later unquiet land came back to him, and again he seemed to see the huge, black, up-flung wall of Table Mountain clean-cut against the blue-black, star-studded sky, and the twinkling lights of Capetown beneath its shadow, with the great, yellow African moon above all, as he beheld it from the deck of the Braemar Castle the night she made Table Bay.
What a curious old and new-world town Capetown was, with its civilized and uncivilized mixture of races, creeds, and dress that you could stand and watch jostling each other in front of the windows of those splendid up-to-date stores in Plein Street. English, Dutch, Portuguese, Hottentot, Malay, Zulu, Kaffir, Hindoo, and Chinese, with the ubiquitous Jew bidding fair to outnumber them all. What a pleasant, lazy time he had had, wandering around there before he went up-country. Out Greenpoint way to the sea’s edge, where one could look clear across past the lighthouse to Simon’s-Town, and Lion’s Head Mountain. And those occasional trips to the outlying suburbs, Wynberg, Paarl, Woodstock, where all the magnates’ luxurious bungalows were, lying half-hidden amidst huge, clustering masses of magnificent tropical foliage; and Rondebosch, where “Groot Schuurr,” the palatial home of Cecil Rhodes, the great Dictator of Cape Colony and Rhodesia, was situated.
He was dead now—that strong, skilful protagonist to whom Africa owed so much, and buried in accordance with his last wish—in a tomb cut out of the solid rock on the summit of the highest peak in the Matoppos, appropriately termed “The View of the World.”
It is his will that he look forth
Across the world he won—
The granite of the ancient North—
Great spaces washed with sun.
Aye—Kipling’s immortal lines were a fitting requiem to the memory of the great dead. Cecil Rhodes was gone, but—
Living he was the land, and dead,
His soul shall be her soul!
How well he recalled that memorable pilgrimage thither, as if to a shrine, that he and Musgrave had made together after the war.
Then those two years spent in the Chartered Company’s service, before the war came, and the godforsaken places he was stationed in previous to his transfer to Johannesburg—Umtali, Nhaukoe, Mumbatua Falls, and Inyongo, up in the Mungamba Mountains, with mostly only natives for company. The bright, cool days, and the long, sweet, silent nights afterwards, up in the Magaliesberg Range, where it was so still that it seemed uncanny. The glorious sunrises—the air heavy with the scent of wattle bloom and mimosa flower, as you came out from your tent in the morning, feeling full of the joy of life, healthy and strong, unrecking of the morrow, and amused yourself throwing stones at the baboons that barked “Boom ba! boom ba!” at you from their perches away up on the ledges in the krantzes.
And then—“Jo’burg,” with its conglomeration of cosmopolitan adventurers. Hard-drinking, busy, grasping men, all struggling gamely in the same great vortex of speculation in the gold and diamond mines of the Rand, and all breathing the same hatred towards the South African Republic, and the tyranny and injustice of “Oom Paul Kruger” and his ministers, whose grasping avarice and total disregard of even the common rights of citizenship were gradually making the Uitlander’s lot unbearable.
Yes, but old Oom got his afterwards, when the war he had provoked finally overwhelmed him and forced him and Steyn to flee from the country and people that they had ruined. A faint, reflective smile relaxed his somber face as he absently hummed a few lines of a doggerel ditty that had been sung around every camp fire from Pretoria to Capetown in the later stages of the war: