ON TREK.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 18949, 21 February 1925, Page 1 (Supplement)

ON TREK.

ABROAD IN SOUTH AFRICA.

BY WILLIAM J. M AKIN.

There is adventure enough to bo found on the road in South Africa. Through the blinding sunshine, half hidden by a cloud of dust, adventure plods steadily into view.

It comes not with a rushing turmoil. There is no swashbuckling /.est about adventure on the high road in Africa. It usually appears in a lolling, half-somno-lent state, perched on the front of an oxwaggon, and gazes at you through halfclosed eyes. Then it slowly fades away into the trembling of colour that marks the horizon of the veld. These men of the road in South Africa arc queer, silent folk, as quiet as the spacious brown veld which surrounds them. Occasionally the monotony of their silence breaks into speech, like the sudden eruption of a kopje in the distance, an eruption without reason in tho scheme of Nature.

Out of the dust behind a span of gaunt, travel-worn oxen comes a long wail: " . ..Wa..a ..a . . a!" There appears the bent slouch hat, which, together with a straggly beard, almost hides the sun-tanned face of the man on trek. Slowly, and with the patient solemnity of the oxen, he descends from his waggon seat, and moves toward you. The long sjambok dangles from his wrist, and a gnarled sun-burnt hand is thrust toward you. That hand thrust forward is disconcerting. It is in the nature of a challenge, and cannot be refused. It is tho action of a man who wishes to know if you carry weapons. One cannot be too careful in the loneliness of the veld. Cricket on the Veld. " How far to the next river bed ? All dry! Nothing but sand. Teh!" 'lhe bearded face gazes critically at the gaunt oxen, whose big patient, eyes loom toward the ground. The sweat and the red dust of the veld are smeared across his face with the back of bis hand, and with a cursory, " Danke!" he is climbing back to his seal. Half an hour later only a faint smear of dust against the shimmering heat haze shows the trail of this lonely wanderer of the veld.

It is when you come to those corrugated iron oases of the veld, the dorps, that you meet many of the men of the road. At the back of the Jew's store you find the little gathering in the bar, and strong Cape brandy is loosening the tongues of. these silent men. The barman, shirt-sleeved, and eyes puckered from much, gazing at sunshine horizons, is the comfortable cynic of the assembly. An offer of a drink draws from him the laconic, " Thanks, but I don't." Insistence leads him to drink a lemonade, but neither pipe nor cigarette will attract him.

"Alius been a non-drinker and nonsmoker,'' he explains with a grin. " Ever since 1 worked in the copper mines. Good days, those were. Cricket matches every week-end, and I once knocked up 183 not out. ' Won a bet of five shillings on that, too." Amazing to conceive of cricket being played in this sandy desert. let so it is. ' " One of the best teams in South Africa and every man among them a player." But tho talk of mines has roused a hitherto silent prospector to volubility. " Mineral wealth's enormous," he tells me confidentially over his brandy. " 1 ought to know 'cause I prospected here for twenty years. I could take you to a mica mine two days' trek from here, where, with a gang of natives ycr could make a fortune in a few years. I'm not bluffing. Pegged out several claims myself and got no money to work 'em. Suppose you come along with me termorrow, ell?"

I resist the lore of mica and the wilc.s of a prospector and listen to a belted and spurred policeman who has stamped into the bar. A revolver sticks menacingly from a holster at his side, and he tosses off his drink with a flourish. Brought, and Loneliness. " I've seen sights that'd make you shiver in Bushman Land. Just come back from patrol there. My horse all skin and bone. Nothing to feed the poor brute on. Natives dying of drought. No crops. Two boys I had with me grovelled in an ant hole for food. . . Give us another tot, daddy." "Ach! It's the Government," growled a bearded Dutch farmer, slicing with a huge knife a strip of biltong, and cramming it into his mouth. But. the real men of the road are met in the evening, when the sky behind the kopje is a blaze of saffron and pink. The colour is like the cheap lurid icing that one enjoyed as a schoolboy. On the veld this is the hour of tho outspan. You find a few miserable donkeys nosing the veld for food. They stare with comic absurdity at the approach of a stranger. A few yards away is the waggon, uptilted, beneath which the Dutchman, his wife and children have crouched to chew their biltong and drink the hot coffee. A coloured boy is scouring the veld for fuel for tho fire. Such is the camp for the night. The stare of these dwellers on the veld is almost as expressionless as that of tho cattle. r lhe stranger is given a nod, a growled " Good iiacht," and you pass on to that gaudily coloured horizon.

Sometimes the traveller on the road has to call at. those lonely mud-walled farmhouses that have, been baked by the sun until they look more like Malay tombs than homesteads. To reach them one crosses the stretch of sand and stones that marks the river, only to come up against the blank expressionless stare of tho mud walls. A knock, and the silence suggests that it is the houses of the dead. Another knock, and life, in tho shape of a lean, hungry, snarling hound comes leaping at. you from the dust. Primitive People. The dark features of a coloured maid appear, the whites of whose eyes stare out in frightened fashion, and make one think of boiled eggs without the shell. There is a startled exclamation in Dutch and then you are faced with the hardwork worn features of a womap of the veld. The cold, blue eyes look at you suspiciously. This is a lonely spot, tho next homestead is 3G miles away. " What is it?" " The road to Orangefonto u." " Ja! It is there . . . good dag!" And the dour face disappears, the dog is called inside, a door slams, and the deathlike silence of the veld overwhelms you once again. A primitive existence, this life on the veld, and primitive the people who dwell there. Yet it is good to go into this primitive atmosphere, into these deep silences and sun-washed spaces, for it is the real South Africa. And there is adventure. to bo found on the road there, deep satisfying adventure that comes to those who are struggling against a fierce, combative Nature. There is sense of clean spaciousness in the day and a feeling of awful loneliness at night. Yet, silent and moody as are the men of the road in South Africa, one finds in them a type unknown to the civilisation of Europe. There, is a companionable sense even in their loneliness, and a good night always to bo spent at the outspan.