The day had been very hot even for the Transvaal,
where the days still know how to be hot in the autumn,
although the neck of the summer is broken—especially
when the thunderstorms hold off for a week or two,
as they do occasionally. Even the succulent blue
lilies—a variety of the agapanthus which
is so familiar to us in English greenhouses—hung
their long trumpet-shaped flowers and looked oppressed
and miserable, beneath the burning breath of the hot
wind which had been blowing for hours like the draught
from a volcano. The grass, too, near the wide
roadway that stretched in a feeble and indeterminate
fashion across the veldt, forking, branching, and
reuniting like the veins on a lady’s arm, was
completely coated over with a thick layer of red dust.
But the hot wind was going down now, as it always
does towards sunset. Indeed, all that remained
of it were a few strictly local and miniature whirlwinds,
which would suddenly spring up on the road itself,
and twist and twirl fiercely round, raising a mighty
column of dust fifty feet or more into the air, where
it hung long after the wind had passed, and then slowly
dissolved as its particles floated to the earth.
Advancing along the road, in the immediate track of
one of these desultory and inexplicable whirlwinds,
was a man on horseback. The man looked limp and
dirty, and the horse limper and dirtier. The hot
wind had “taken all the bones out of them,”
as the Kafirs say, which was not very much to be wondered
at, seeing that they had been journeying through it
for the last four hours without off-saddling.
Suddenly the whirlwind, which had been travelling
along smartly, halted, and the dust, after revolving
a few times in the air like a dying top, slowly began
to disperse in the accustomed fashion. The man
on the horse halted also, and contemplated it in an
absent kind of way.
“It’s just like a man’s life,”
he said aloud to his horse, “coming from nobody
knows where, nobody knows why, and making a little
column of dust on the world’s highway, then
passing away, leaving the dust to fall to the ground
again, to be trodden under foot and forgotten.”
The speaker, a stout, well set-up, rather ugly man,
apparently on the wrong side of thirty, with pleasant
blue eyes and a reddish peaked beard, laughed a little
at his own sententious reflection, and then gave his
jaded horse a tap with the sjambock in his hand.
“Come on, Blesbok,” he said, “or
we shall never get to old Croft’s place to-night.
By Jove! I believe that must be the turn,”
and he pointed with his whip to a little rutty track
that branched from the Wakkerstroom main road and
stretched away towards a curious isolated hill with
a large flat top, which rose out of the rolling plain
some four miles to the right. “The old
Boer said the second turn,” he went on still
talking to himself, “but perhaps he lied.
I am told that some of them think it is a good joke
to send an Englishman a few miles wrong. Let’s
see, they told me the place was under the lee of a
table-topped hill, about half an hour’s ride
from the main road, and that is a table-topped hill,
so I think I will try it. Come on, Blesbok,”
and he put the tired nag into a sort of “tripple,”
or ambling canter much affected by South African horses.
