united efforts of thirty-four oxen cannot budge it. Night
is falling, the traveller is “ dying ” of hunger, but as the
provisions are in the vehicle behind he must make an
effort to reach them. The first step he takes sinks him
to the knees in muck. He recovers himself, remounts the
waggon, and has to sit caged in it all night with famishing
vitals.
This rough baptism of the traveller ends in a rheumatic
fever, and while suffering from its effects, he comes across
an English farm. The owner is affable, gives him milk,
and shows him where to outspan. This is in such contrast
to the treatment he received from a Cape Boer, that we
are not surprised at his abuse of the Cape Dutchmen in
general, whose intelligences he says are “ dull and dry,”
like the country of their birth.
On the fifteenth day from Vryburg he reached Mafeking,
which is now a considerable town on the open and treeless
prairie, 4194 feet above the sea, and 870 miles from Cape
Town. Mr. Decle found it to consist of a few buildings,
chiefly of corrugated iron, grouped around the market
square. Since then it has become famous as the starting
place of the young lads who followed Jameson into the
Transvaal. We lately made the journey from Vryburg
to Mafeking in a few hours in a comfortable railway
carriage, and the touch of an electric bell brought us a
meal, five o’clock tea, or a mint julep whenever it was
needed. At night we slept between snowy sheets, during
the day we wrote our letters or read novels. But Mr.
Decle had to undergo veritable torture during his journey.
Sleep was impossible while the waggons were moving, as
he was pitched continually from one side to the other, and
narrowly escaped fracturing his head against the hard
wooden walls of his vehicle. Added to which the monotony
was terrible. “ Nothing,” he says, “ is more tiring to the
sight and depressing to the spirits than these limitless
plains for days and weeks at a stretch.” The dust was also
blinding, for the red sand was kicked up by the feet of
the oxen, and the waggon mpved through a moving cloud
of fine sand.
But notwithstanding these unpleasantnesses, the traveller
by ox-waggon has greater opportunities of studying
nature than the rail tourist. He has daily talks
with chiefs and people, and becomes familiar with their
nature and lives, hears their local traditions, discovers
their vices and their virtues. We, flying by rail at
twenty - five miles an hour, get but mere glimpses of
brown faces and scantily costumed bodies, a momentary
peep at clusters of huts, and a passing glance at the
top of an uniform bush. Those who are not students
of primitive humanity will not care to be banged against
rocks in a springless buck-waggon, or jerked against
boulders with the waggon bed at an angle of 40°, or stuck
in fetid mud for hours; nor would they like to be subjected
to tropical downpours, or to be baked in the sun,
and, when they want to wash, be charged a shilling for
a basin of water or a sovereign for helping one out of
the mud ; and they certainly would object when just going
to sleep to have their tent or waggon canvas whipped
off by a tornado and to have the trouble of outspanning
and inspanning every six miles of a thousand mile journey.
How many of us would like to be devoured by anxiety
about our cattle, who must needs stray far to get nourishment,
and are therefore exposed to lions and other feral
creatures; who sicken from eating poisonous plants, or the
badness of the water, fatigue, and thirst? Men like Mr.
Decle must, however, suffer all these horrors, and worse.
He risked catching typhoid by drinking from tainted
pools and wells, nay, sometimes he had to quench his
thirst with liquid manure.
At Palapshwe, a town of 15,000 people, typhoid epidemics
raged from the refuse being thrown near the
drinking water. While he was there more than forty
people died daily from typhoid. It was also one of the
worst places for horse sickness, and hundreds of oxen
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