DARKEST AFRICA

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 223, 14 January 1911, Page 9

DARKEST AFRICA

AN AUSTRALIAN'S IMPRESSIONS. From Kimberley to Bulawayo wa travelled across a boundless tableland, a treeless plain, liardlv broken by a single bill or kopje, that can surely have no rival for monotony of scenery the wide world over (says the special correspondent of the Age, who travelled to South Africa with the Federal Premier, Mr. Fisher). Of running rivers we saw no sign; of creeks there were a few, but nearly all were dry. The plain was fairly well grassed (the rainy season has commenced), and widely clothed with green, but, destitute of shelter for stock and unspeakably desolate, being swept night and day with winds that sough and search over thei limitless expanse, tear the soil from under the very roots of the grasses and scatter blinding clouds of dust upon the world. Now and then, at far-flung intervals, we passed white men's villages, and we saw a white face or two; but they looked sadly out of place, and only served to emphasise the message of the teeming knfiir kraals—"South Africa belongs to the blacks." We saw many herds of cattle, many flocks of goats. They were all of inferior typo—small, unhardened beasts, ill-con-ditioned and unkempt. A poor, inwatered, hungry country it appeared to us; rich in nought save what stands involved within the signification of that blessed word, "potentialities." The Canadian Minister, M. Lemieux, voiced the opinion of us all when he said, "I wondor that any white man can lie. found to leave his own country to settle in such a dour, unlovely wilderness." Later on we, came to trees and hills. But the hills were bleak and bare, andXhe tress thin, scrubby, stunted rubbish, fit, perhaps, to burn and elsewise useless. True enough, as we steamed into the heart of Africa the trees acquired a more imposing stature, and their foliage assumed many gaudy hues, giving the landscape an opulent autumnal tone; but they spoke nearly always of a hard struggle with grudging nature, and the biggest timber (the biggest trees are pigmies to our gums) are dubbed in sinister fashion, "fever trees." because they grow where fever nourishes. The country seems incapable of supporting more than an apparition of vegetable life. They say that it is an ideal land for horses and cattle, "We saw 110 proof of it, though we saw the country at its utmost, best, and everywhere we heard melancholy tales of rinderpest and other dreadtul stock diseases. I would rather have ten acres of Australian land than ten times as many square miles of such "ideal" cattle country. I admit, that on the ground grow myriads of (laiinti:i<x lilies and tuber* (some of the blooms are exquisitely beautiful), and orchids, too: but botanists arc not the best settlers, and the farmer needs more than spiritual nourishment, also his sock. Cattle do no thrive on tiger lilies, and it is poor comfort to overlook a wilderness of blooms when one's stock is famishing for homely grass, or being ravaged by the rinderpest.