Bulawayo, November 5, 1897.
This extraordinary town does not disappoint expectations by its progress or present condition. It is in about as advanced a state as it could well be, considering the troubles it has endured. War and cattle-plague have retarded the progressive growth of a town that would have been by this, judging from the spirit of the people, a phenomenon in a century which has seen cities grow like mushrooms. It is cast on broad lines; its streets rival those of Washington for breadth, and its houses occupy as much space as decency requires, for unless they were pulled down and scattered over their respective lots, it is scarcely possible, with due respect to height, that they could occupy more.
Bulawayo.
Its situation, however, does not approach what I had anticipated to find. From its association with Lo Bengula, the dread Matabele despot on whose single word hung life and death, I had expected to find Bulawayo situate on a commanding eminence, looking down on broad lowlands and far-reaching views that fed the despot’s pride of power; instead of which we found it squatted low on a reddish plain, the ridges of its houses scarcely higher than the thorn bush that surrounds it. There are no hills or eminences anywhere in view, whence a large prospect could be obtained. In fact, the greater part of South Africa appears different to what I had imagined. Probably the partiality of all South African writers for Dutch terms had contributed to give me erroneous impressions. When I read Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid’s descriptions of the West, I fancied I knew what a prairie or plain was, and when, years afterwards, I came in view of them my impressions were only confirmed. But high, low, and bush veld, and Karroo, etc., have been always indefinite terms to me, and so I came to conceive aspects of land which were different to the reality. For a thousand miles we have been travelling over very level or slightly undulating plains, bush-covered over large spaces, the rest being genuine grassy prairie. After a thousand mites, or nearly three days by rail, over a flat country of this description, one naturally thinks that the objective point of such a journey must be of a different character. Most of the guests were on the qui vive for a pleasing change of scenery until we were within five minutes of Bulawayo station. All at once we caught sight of a few gleams of zinc roofs through the low thorn bush, and a single iron smoke-stack. When we came out of the bush, Bulawayo was spread out before us, squatted on what is undeniably a plain. This plain continues to be of the same character of levelness as far as Salisbury, ay, even as far as the northern edge of Mashonaland; it spreads out to Fort Victoria equally level; and as the land declines to N’gami and the Victoria Falls, it still retains the appearance of plains. Now, the wonder to me is, not that I am 1360 miles north of Cape Town, but that the railway limit should be fixed at Bulawayo, a mere bit of undistinguishable acreage in a flat area which extends to over half a million square miles. Why this place more than any other? There is no river near it, there is no topographic feature to distinguish it. Why not have continued this trunk line on to Salisbury, on to Tete, and the Zambesi? Why not have continued it on to the Victoria Falls?
The New Railway.
Considering that we have come all the way from London, 7300 miles away, to celebrate the arrival of the locomotive at Bulawayo, such questions may sound ungrateful, and considering that last night at the banquet every speaker had something favourable to say of the Bechuanaland Railway and its builders, such questions may be supposed to indicate disagreement with the general opinion. There is really no necessity to suppose anything of the kind. Both the builders and the railway deserve praise. The fact that some eight trains have already arrived at Bulawayo, and that every passenger expresses himself warmly as to the condition of the line, and the pleasure derived from the journey, ought to satisfy everyone that the railway is ready for traffic, and will serve for many years, I hope, to connect Bulawayo with Cape Town.
But I want my readers to thoroughly understand what has been done, without prejudice to Bulawayo, the railway, or its builders. I am not so surprised at the railway, as at the length of time people in South Africa were content to be without it. The whole country seems to have been created for railway making. It offers as few difficulties as the London Embankment Hyde Park is extremely uneven as compared with it. For nearly a thousand miles the railway sleepers have been laid at intervals of thirty inches on the natural face of the land; the rails have been laid across these, and connected together; the native navvies have scraped a little soil together, sufficient to cover the steel sleepers; and the iron road was thus ready for traffic. In March, 1896, the railway was but a few miles beyond Mafeking—say, about 880 miles from Cape Town—on November 4, 1897, it is 1360 miles in length from Cape Town, showing a construction of 480 miles in 19 months. There is nothing remarkable in this. The union Pacific Railway between Omaha and Denver progressed at three, four, even five miles a day, over a much more irregular surface; but then, of course, the navvies were Irishmen, who handled the shovel like experts, and the rails with the precision and skill of master workmen. Natives could not be expected to attain the proficiency and organisation of the American Celts.
In one of the Cape Specials.
Our special train left Cape Town on Sunday at 4 p.m. A corridor train of six coaches, marked Bulawayo, at an ordinary provincial-looking station, seemed somewhat strange. Had it been marked Ujiji, or Yambuya, it could not have been more so. Three of us were put in a compartment for four. The fourth berth was available for hand luggage. Soon after starting we were served with tea and biscuits, and were it not for the flat wilderness scenery we might have imagined ourselves in an International sleeping car. Time tables were also furnished us, from which we learned that we were due at Kimberley, 647 miles, at 10:15 p.m. on the next day, November 1; at Mafeking, 870 miles, at 3:12 p.m. on November 2; Palachwe, in Khama’s country, 1132 miles, at 12:47 p.m., November 3; and at Bulawayo, 1360 miles, at 9:30 a.m. on November 4, which would be ninety hours at fifteen miles per hour.
It took us an hour to cross the Lowry Strait, which at no very distant period must have been covered by sea and separated the Cape Peninsula from the Continent.
At 5:30 we arrived at the Paarl, 35 miles, a beautiful place suggestive of Italy with its vineyards, gardens and shrubbery, and lovingly enfolded by the Drakenstein Range. With its groves of fir and eucalyptus, bright sunshine, and pleasant-faced people, with picturesque mountains round about, it seemed a most desirable place.
The Paarl Station and others we passed bear witness to the excellence of Cape railway administration. The names of the stations were boldly printed on japanned iron plates, and though the passage of so many trains crowded with distinguished strangers had drawn large assemblages of the Colonists, male and female, whites, mulattoes, and negroes, the cleanliness and orderliness that prevailed were very conspicuous.
A Message to Mr Labouchere.
At 6 p.m. we had passed Wellington, 45 miles, which went to prove the rate of travel. This town also drew from us admiring expressions for its picturesque situation in one of the folds of the Drakenstein, for the early summer green of its groves, vineyards, and fields, and its pretty white houses. I thought, as I marked the charming town and its church spires, and the sweet groves around, what a contrast it was to the time when the Hottentot reared his cattle in the valley, and the predatory bushman infested the neighbourhood, and preyed on ground game and goats.
On the platform, among those who welcomed our coming, were a dozen Radical shoemakers lately arrived from Leicester. They charged Colonel Saunderson, M.P., my fellow traveller, with an expressive message to Mr Labouchere. It is too forcible and inelegant for print, but it admirably illustrates the rapidity with which Radicals become perverted by travel.
Darkness found the train labouring through the mountainous defile of the Hex River. We could see but a loom of the rugged heights on either side, but from all accounts this part of the line is one of the show places which strangers are asked to note.
At daylight we were well on the Karroo, which at first sight was all but a desert. However, we were not long on it before we all took to it kindly. The air was strangely appetising, and we could not help regarding it with benevolence. The engineers who designed the line must have been skilful men, and by the track, as the train curves in and out of narrowing valleys and broadening plains, we are led to suppose that the Continent slopes gently from the interior down to Table Bay. The railway is a surface line, without a single tunnel or any serious cutting. The gradients in some places are stiff, but a single engine finds no difficulty in surmounting them.
At 4 p.m. of November 1 we reached the 458th mile from Cape Town, so that our rate of travel had been nineteen miles the hour. On tolerably level parts our speed, as timed by watch, was thirty miles; stoppages and steep gradients reduce this to nineteen miles.
We were fast asleep by the time we reached Kimberley. Night, and the short pause we made, prevented any correct impressions of the chief city of the Diamond Fields. At half-past six of November 2 we woke up at Taungs, 731 miles. The small stream over which we entered the late Crown Colony of Bechuanaland serves as a frontier line between it and Griqualand.
The Capabilities of Bechuanaland.
The first view of the country reminded me of East Central Africa, and I looked keenly at it to gauge its capabilities. To a new-comer it would not seem so full of promise as it was to me. It would appear as a waterless region, and too dry for a man accustomed to green fields and flowing rivers, but I have seen nothing between the immediate neighbourhood of the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains to surpass it, and each mile we travelled in Bechuanaland confirmed that impression. Every few miles we crossed dry watercourses; but, though there was no water in sight, it does not derogate from its value as farm land. The plateau of Persia is a naked desert compared to it, and yet Persia possesses eight millions of people, and at one time contained double that number. The prairies of Nebraska, of Colorado, and Kansas are inferior in appearance, and I have seen them in their uninhabited state, but to-day they are remarkable for the growth of their many cities and their magnificent farming estates. All that is wanted to render Bechuanaland a desirable colony is water, so that every farm might draw irrigating supplies from reservoirs along these numerous watercourses. For Nature has so disposed the land that anyone with observant eyes may see with what little trouble water could be converted into rich green pastures and fields bearing weighty grain crops. The track of the railway runs over broad, almost level, valleys, hemmed in by masses of elevated land which have been broken up by ages of torrential rains, and whose soil has been swept by the floods over the valleys, naturally leaving the bases of the mountains higher than the central depression. If a Persian colonist came here he would say: “How admirable for my purpose! I shall begin my draining ditches or canauts from the bases of those hills and train them down towards the lower parts of these valleys, by which time I shall have as many constant and regular running streams as I have ditches, and my flocks and herds and fields shall have abundance of the necessary element.” A thousand of such Persians would create thus a central stream with the surplus water flowing along the valley, and its borders would become one continuous grove. As the Persians would do, the English colonists whose luck it may be to come to this land may also do, and enrich themselves faster than by labouring at gold mining.
These dry river-beds, now filled with sand, need only to have stone dams built across, every few hundred yards, to provide any number of reservoirs. They have been formed by rushing torrents which have furrowed the lowlands down to the bed rock, and the depth and breadth of the river courses show us what mighty supplies of water are wasted every year. As the torrents slackened their flow, they deposited their sediment, and finally filtered through underneath until no water was visible, but by dig............