We had 35 miles more to travel before our last stop in Zululand would be reached. The post cart left at five o'clock in the morning, with four passengers, and was drawn by four mules. The road was level for the most part, with high grass growing on each side, broken only by an occasional giraffe thorn or mimosa tree. The mimosa was in flower, and so much fragrance was diffused from the thorn tree that one would know of its existence if it were not in sight a hundred feet away.
"Hello, Graham!" shouted one of the passengers to a white man who stood in the door of a building at which we had pulled up. We had reached N'Halini, the first relay, where we breakfasted. "Hello! everybody," returned Graham, for he proved to be the proprietor of the eating station. "I haven't any eggs to serve you this morning, but I'm strong on steak, ham and bacon. Bring out a big piece of steak to make up for the eggs," he directed one of his Zulu boys.
Graham is a sailor with a wooden leg. He entertained us by telling how many times he had been caught in the net fastened to the boom of a sailing ship—a "wind-jammer," as he termed that style of craft—and how, when encountering the fierce gales that blow in the Straits of Magellan, he had been blown entirely off his feet, his body being lifted in mid-air, his legs suggestive of ribbons, while holding to a deck rail.
"Did you get enough to eat?" he asked, when we had finished. And we admitted we had. Graham had two pigs eaten by crocodiles the day before, and he could not restrain himself from bemoaning his luck.
"So long, fellows! I'll have eggs for you when you come back. So long!" were the parting words of the onetime sailor, as, with an additional team of mules, we started on our second relay.
"Sit forward, please, while we are going up this seven-mile hill; the cart is tilting back too much," said the driver. We had five passengers now, as another one had got on at Graham's place. It's easier to say Graham's place than it is to try to pronounce the Zulu name.
On, on we traveled over those beautiful hills of Zululand, the passengers chatting as we moved along. Grassy hills, 500 feet high, bare of timber and even shrubbery, with native huts built on the sides, and small patches of corn growing here and there, proved of interest. Vultures were flying high up in the air, bevies of guinea fowl scurried to cover, and the wagtail, a black and white bird of swallow size, with a tail ten inches long, crossed the roadway from time to time. We had been told of the beauty of Zululand, and nothing had been exaggerated.
Grass—long and short—was growing everywhere, enough to feed millions of cattle, and not a "critter" grazing in sight. The Zulus, before and for some years after the white man settled in South Africa, were a wealthy tribe. Hundreds of thousands of cattle, sheep and goats roamed over and fed off these ever-grassy hills; but tick fever—East Coast fever, it is as often called—had fattened the vultures and made the Zulu poor.
We reached the second relay, then the third, but the beauty of landscape did not diminish. Our next relay will be the end of our stage journey—Melmoth—52 miles from the railroad.
"The stopping off place" is a term often heard, but when one reaches a point where there is no railroad and the terminus only of post carts, it is certainly the stopping off place. Europeans live in remote places still beyond Melmoth, and their mail is brought to them by native postmen on foot.