When exploration began, it began from this south-west corner of Africa. It began late. In 1806, when the British took the Cape from the Dutch, few indeed were the white men who had penetrated more than one hundred miles from the coast, and the farther interior was known only by report. For thirty years more progress was slow; and it is within our own time that nearly all the exploration, and the settlement which has followed quickly on the heels of exploration, has taken place. Just sixty years ago the Dutch Boers passed in their heavy waggons from Cape Colony to the spots where Bloemfontein and Pretoria now stand. In 1854-56 David Livingstone made his way through Bechuanaland to the falls of the Zambesi and the west coast at St. Paul de Loanda. In 1889 the vast territories between the Transvaal Republic and the Zambesi began to be occupied by the Mashonaland pioneers. All these explorers, all the farmers, missionaries, hunters, and mining prospectors, came up into South Central Africa from the south-west extremity of the continent over the great plateau. They moved north-eastward, because there was more rain, and therefore more grass and game in that direction than toward the north. They were checked from time to time by the warlike native tribes; but they were drawn on by finding everywhere a country in which Europeans could live and thrive. It was the existence of this high and cool plateau that permitted their discoveries and encouraged their settlement. And thus the rich interior has come to belong, not to the Portuguese, who first laid hold of South Africa, but to the races who first entered the plateau at the point where it is nearest the sea, the Dutch and the English. Coming a thousand miles by land, they have seized and colonised the country that lies within sixty or eighty miles of the ocean behind the Portuguese settlements, because they had good healthy air to breathe during all those thousand miles of journey; while the Portuguese, sunk among tropical swamps, were doing no more than maintain their hold upon the coast, and were allowing even the few forts they had established along the lower course of the Zambesi to crumble away.
The same natural conditions, however, which have made the plateau healthy, have kept it sparsely peopled. Much of this high interior, whose settlement has occupied the last sixty years, is a desert unfit, and likely to be always unfit, for human habitation. Even in those parts which are comparatively well watered, the grazing for sheep and cattle is so scanty during some months of the year that farms are large, houses are scattered far from one another, and the population remains extremely thin. The Wilderness of the Karroo cuts off Cape Town and its comparatively populous neighbourhood from the inhabited, though thinly inhabited, pastoral districts of the Orange Free State. Between these two settled districts there are only a few villages, scattered at intervals of many miles along a line of railway four hundred miles in length. In the Free State and the Transvaal the white population is extremely sparse, save in the mining region of the Witwatersrand, because ranching requires few hands, and only a few hundred square miles out of many thousands have been brought under cultivation. Thus, while the coolness of the climate has permitted Europeans to thrive in these comparatively low latitudes, its dryness has kept down their numbers and has retarded not only their political development, but their progress in all those arts and pursuits which imply a tolerably large and varied society. The note of South African life, the thing that strikes the traveller with increasing force as he visits one part of the country after another, is the paucity of inhabitants, and the isolated life which these inhabitants, except in six or seven towns, are forced to lead. This is the doing of nature. She has not severed the country into distinct social or political communities by any lines of physical demarcation, but she has provided such scanty means of sustenance for human life and so few openings for human industry unaided by capital, that the settlers (save where capital has come to their aid) remain few indeed, and one may call the interior of South Africa a vast solitude, with a few oases of population dotted here and there over it.
CHAPTER VII
ASPECTS OF SCENERY
The sketch I have given of the physical character of South Africa will doubtless have conveyed to the reader that the country offers comparatively little to attract the lover of natural scenery. This impression is true if the sort of landscape we have learned to enjoy in Europe and in the eastern part of the United States be taken as the type of scenery which gives most pleasure. Variety of form, boldness of outline, the presence of water in lakes and running streams, and, above all, foliage and verdure, are the main elements of beauty in those landscapes; while if any one desires something of more imposing grandeur, he finds it in snow-capped mountains like the Alps or the Cascade Range, or in majestic crags such as those which tower over the fiords of Norway. But the scenery of South Africa is wholly unlike that of Europe or of most parts of America. It is, above all things, a dry land, a parched and thirsty land, where no clear brooks murmur through the meadow, no cascade sparkles from the cliff, where mountain and plain alike are brown and dusty except during the short season of the rains. And being a dry land, it is also a bare land. Few are the favoured spots in which a veritable forest can be seen; for though many tracts are wooded, the trees are almost always thin and stunted. In Matabililand, for instance, though a great part of the surface is covered with wood, you see no trees forty feet high, and few reaching thirty; while in the wilderness of the Kalahari Desert and Damaraland nothing larger than a bush is visible, except the scraggy and thorny mimosa.
These features of South Africa—the want of water and the want of greenness—are those to which a native of Western Europe finds it hardest to accustom himself, however thoroughly he may enjoy the brilliant sun and the keen dry air which go along with them. And it must also be admitted that over very large areas the aspects of nature are so uniform as to become monotonous. One may travel eight hundred miles and see less variety in the landscape than one would find in one-fourth of the same distance anywhere in Western Europe or in America east of the Alleghany Mountains. The same geological formations prevail over wide areas, and give the same profile to the hilltop, the same undulations to the plain; while in travelling northward toward the Equator the flora seems to change far less between 34° and 18° south latitude than it changes in the journey from Barcelona to Havre, through only half as many degrees of latitude.
There are, nevertheless, several interesting bits of scenery in South Africa, which, if they do not of themselves repay the traveller for so long a journey, add sensibly to his enjoyment. The situation of Cape Town, with a magnificent range of precipices rising behind it, a noble bay in front, and environs full of beautiful avenues and pleasure-grounds, while bold mountain-peaks close the more distant landscape, is equalled by that of few other cities in the world. Constantinople and Naples, Bombay and San Francisco, cannot boast of more perfect or more varied prospects. There are some fine pieces of wood and water scenery along the south coast of Cape Colony, and one of singular charm in the adjoining colony of Natal, where the suburbs of Durban, the principal port, though they lack the grandeur which its craggy heights give to the neighbourhood of Cape Town have, with a warmer climate, a richer and more tropically luxuriant vegetation. In the great range of mountains which runs some seventeen hundred miles from Cape Town almost to the banks of the Zambesi, the scenery becomes striking in three districts only. One of these is Basutoland, a little native territory which lies just where Cape Colony, the Orange Free State, and Natal meet. Its peaks are the highest in Africa south of Mount Kilimanjaro, for several of them reach 11,000 feet. On the south-east this mountain-land, the Switzerland of South Africa, faces Natal and East Griqualand with a long range of formidable precipices, impassable for many miles. The interior contains valleys and glens of singular beauty, some wild and rugged, some clothed with rich pasture. The voice of brooks, a sound rare in Africa, rises from the hidden depths of the gorges, and here and there torrents plunging over the edge of a basaltic cliff into an abyss below make waterfalls which are at all seasons beautiful, and when swollen by the rains of January majestic. Except wood, of which there is unhappily nothing more than a little scrubby bush in the sheltered hollows, nearly all the elements of beauty are present; and the contrast between the craggy summits and the soft rich pasture and cornlands which lie along their northern base, gives rise to many admirable landscapes.
Two hundred miles north-north-east of Basutoland the great Quathlamba Range rises in very bold slopes from the coast levels behind Delagoa Bay, and the scenery of the valleys and passes is said to be extremely grand. Knowing it, however, only by report, I will not venture to describe it. Nearly five hundred miles still farther to the north, in the district called Manicaland, already referred to, is a third mountain region, less lofty than Basutoland, but deriving a singular charm from the dignity and variety of its mountain forms. The whole country is so elevated that summits of 7000 or even 8000 feet do not produce any greater effect upon the eye than does Ben Lomond as seen from Loch Lomond, or Mount Washington from the Glen House. But there is a boldness of line about these granite peaks comparable to those of the west coast of Norway or of the finest parts of the Swiss Alps. Some of them rise in smooth shafts of apparently inaccessible rock; others form long ridges of pinnacles of every kind of shape, specially striking when they stand out against the brilliantly clear morning or evening sky. The valleys are well wooded, the lower slopes covered with herbage, so the effect of these wild peaks is heightened by the softness of the surroundings which they dominate, while at the same time the whole landscape becomes more complex and more noble by the mingling of such diverse elements. No scenery better deserves the name of romantic. And even in the tamer parts, where instead of mountains there are only low hills, or "kopjes" (as they are called in South Africa), the slightly more friable rock found in these hills decomposes under the influence of the weather into curiously picturesque and fantastic forms, with crags riven to their base, and detached pillars supporting loose blocks and tabular masses, among or upon which the timid Mashonas have built their huts in the hope of escaping the raids of their warlike enemies, the Matabili.