Though I must admit that South Africa, taken as a whole, offers far less to attract the lover of natural beauty than does Southern or Western Europe or the Pacific States of North America, there are two kinds of charm which it possesses in a high degree. One is that of colour. Monotonous as the landscapes often are, there is a warmth and richness of tone about them which fills and delights the eye. One sees comparatively little of that whitish-blue limestone which so often gives a hard and chilling aspect to the scenery of the lower ridges of the Alps and of large parts of the coasts of the Mediterranean. In Africa even the grey granite or gneiss has a deeper tone than these limestones, and it is frequently covered by red and yellow lichens of wonderful beauty. The dark basalts and porphyries which occur in many places, the rich red tint which the surface of the sandstone rocks often takes under the scorching sun, give depth of tone to the landscape; and though the flood of midday sunshine is almost overpowering, the lights of morning and evening, touching the mountains with every shade of rose and crimson and violet, are indescribably beautiful. It is in these morning and evening hours that the charm of the pure dry air is specially felt. Mountains fifty or sixty miles away stand out clearly enough to enable all the wealth of their colour and all the delicacy of their outlines to be perceived; and the eye realises, by the exquisitely fine change of tint between the nearer and the more distant ranges, the immensity and the harmony of the landscape. Europeans may think that the continuous profusion of sunlight during most of the year may become wearisome. I was not long enough in the country to find it so, and I observed that those who have lived for a few years in South Africa declare they prefer that continuous profusion to the murky skies of Britain or Holland or North Germany. But even if the fine weather which prevails for eight months in the year be monotonous, there is compensation in the extraordinary brilliancy of the atmospheric effects throughout the rainy season, and especially in its first weeks. During nine days which I spent in the Transvaal at that season, when several thunderstorms occurred almost every day, the combinations of sunshine, lightning, and cloud, and the symphonies—if the expression may be permitted—of light and shade and colour which their changeful play produced in the sky and on the earth, were more various and more wonderful than a whole year would furnish forth for enjoyment in Europe.
The other peculiar charm which South African scenery possesses is that of primeval solitude and silence. It is a charm which is differently felt by different minds. There are many who find the presence of what Homer calls "the rich works of men" essential to the perfection of a landscape. Cultivated fields, gardens, and orchards, farmhouses dotted here and there, indications in one form or another of human life and labour, do not merely give a greater variety to every prospect, but also impart an element which evokes the sense of sympathy with our fellow-beings, and excites a whole group of emotions which the contemplation of nature, taken by itself, does not arouse. No one is insensible to these things and some find little delight in any scene from which they are absent. Yet there are other minds to which there is something specially solemn and impressive in the untouched and primitive simplicity of a country which stands now just as it came from the hands of the Creator. The self-sufficingness of nature, the insignificance of man, the mystery of a universe which does not exist, as our ancestors fondly thought, for the sake of man, but for other purposes hidden from us and for ever undiscoverable—these things are more fully realised and more deeply felt when one traverses a boundless wilderness which seems to have known no change since the remote ages when hill and plain and valley were moulded into the forms we see to-day. Feelings of this kind powerfully affect the mind of the traveller in South Africa. They affect him in the Karroo, where the slender line of rails, along which his train creeps all day and all night across wide stretches of brown desert and under the crests of stern dark hills, seems to heighten by contrast the sense of solitude—a vast and barren solitude interposed between the busy haunts of men which he has left behind on the shores of the ocean and those still busier haunts whither he is bent, where the pick and hammer sound upon the Witwatersrand, and the palpitating engine drags masses of ore from the depths of the crowded mine. They affect him still more in the breezy highlands of Matabililand, where the eye ranges over an apparently endless succession of undulations clothed with tall grass or waving wood, till they sink in the blue distance toward the plain through which the great Zambesi takes its seaward course.
The wilderness is indeed not wholly unpeopled. Over the wide surface of Matabililand and Mashonaland—an area of some two hundred thousand square miles—there are scattered natives of various tribes, whose numbers have been roughly estimated at from 250,000 to 400,000 persons. But one rarely sees a native except along a few well-beaten tracks, and still more rarely comes upon a cluster of huts in the woods along the streamlets or half hidden among the fissured rocks of a granite kopje. The chief traces of man's presence in the landscape are the narrow and winding footpaths which run hither and thither through the country, and bewilder the traveller who, having strayed from his waggon, vainly hopes by following them to find his way back to the main track, or the wreaths of blue smoke which indicate the spot where a Kafir has set the grass on fire to startle and kill the tiny creatures that dwell in it.
Nothing is at first more surprising to one who crosses a country inhabited by savages than the few marks of their presence which strike the eye, or at least an unpractised eye. The little plot of ground the Kafirs have cultivated is in a few years scarcely distinguishable from the untouched surface of the surrounding land, while the mud-built hut quickly disappears under the summer rains and the scarcely less destructive efforts of the white ants. Here in South Africa the native races seem to have made no progress for centuries, if, indeed, they have not actually gone backward; and the feebleness of savage man intensifies one's sense of the overmastering strength of nature. The elephant and the buffalo are as much the masters of the soil as is the Kafir, and man has no more right to claim that the land was made for him than have the wild beasts of the forest who roar after their prey and seek their meat from God.
These features of South African nature, its silence, its loneliness, its drear solemnity, have not been without their influence upon the mind and temper of the European settler. The most peculiar and characteristic type that the country has produced is the Boer of the eastern plateau, the offspring of those Dutch Africanders who some sixty years ago wandered away from British rule into the wilderness. These men had, and their sons and grandsons have retained, a passion for solitude that even to-day makes them desire to live many miles from any neighbour, a sturdy self-reliance, a grim courage in the face of danger, a sternness from which the native races have often had to suffer. The majesty of nature has not stimulated in them any poetical faculty. But her austerity, joined to the experiences of their race, has contributed to make them grave and serious, closely bound to their ancient forms of piety, and prone to deem themselves the special objects of divine protection.