The Dutch
Doctor Here Advised Me To Do So, To Avoid The Wind.
When all was settled, we climbed the Hottentot's mountains by Sir
Lowry's Pass, a long curve round two hill-
Sides; and what a view!
Simon's Bay opening out far below, and range upon range of crags on
one side, with a wide fertile plain, in which lies Hottentot's
Holland, at one's feet. The road is just wide enough for one
waggon, i.e. very narrow. Where the smooth rock came through,
Choslullah gave a little grunt, and the three bays went off like
hippogriffs, dragging the grey with them. By this time my
confidence in his driving was boundless, or I should have expected
to find myself in atoms at the bottom of the precipice. At the top
of the pass we turned a sharp corner into a scene like the crater
of a volcano, only reaching miles away all round; and we descended
a very little and drove on along great rolling waves of country,
with the mountain tops, all crags and ruins, to our left. At three
we reached Palmiet River, full of palmettos and bamboos, and there
the horses had 'a little roll', and Choslullah and his miniature
washed in the river and prayed, and ate dry bread, and drank their
tepid water out of a bottle with great good breeding and
cheerfulness. Three bullock-waggons had outspanned, and the Dutch
boers and Bastaards (half Hottentots) were all drunk. We went into
a neat little 'public', and had porter and ham sandwiches, for
which I paid 4s. 6d. to a miserable-looking English woman, who was
afraid of her tipsy customers. We got to Houw Hoek, a pretty
valley at the entrance of a mountain gorge, about half-past five,
and drove up to a mud cottage, half inn, half farm, kept by a
German and his wife. It looked mighty queer, but Choslullah said
the host was a good old man, and all clean. So we cheered up, and
asked for food. While the neat old woman was cooking it, up
galloped five fine lads and two pretty flaxen-haired girls, with
real German faces, on wild little horses; and one girl tucked up
her habit, and waited at table, while another waved a green bough
to drive off the swarms of flies. The chops were excellent, ditto
bread and butter, and the tea tolerable. The parlour was a tiny
room with a mud floor, half-hatch door into the front, and the two
bedrooms still tinier and darker, each with two huge beds which
filled them entirely. But Choslullah was right; they were
perfectly clean, with heaps of beautiful pillows; and not only none
of the creatures of which he spoke with infinite terror, but even
no fleas. The man was delighted to talk to me. His wife had
almost forgotten German, and the children did not know a word of
it, but spoke Dutch and English. A fine, healthy, happy family.
It was a pretty picture of emigrant life. Cattle, pigs, sheep, and
poultry, and pigeons innumerable, all picked up their own living,
and cost nothing; and vegetables and fruit grow in rank abundance
where there is water. I asked for a book in the evening, and the
man gave me a volume of Schiller. A good breakfast, - and we paid
ninepence for all.
This morning we started before eight, as it looked gloomy, and came
through a superb mountain defile, out on to a rich hillocky
country, covered with miles of corn, all being cut as far as the
eye could reach, and we passed several circular threshing-floors,
where the horses tread out the grain. Each had a few mud hovels
near it, for the farmers and men to live in during harvest.
Altogether, I was most lucky, had two beautiful days, and enjoyed
the journey immensely. It was most 'abentheuerlich'; the light
two-wheeled cart, with four wild little horses, and the marvellous
brown driver, who seemed to be always going to perdition, but made
the horses do apparently impossible things with absolute certainty;
and the pretty tiny boy who came to help his uncle, and was so
clever, and so preternaturally quiet, and so very small: then the
road through the mountain passes, seven or eight feet wide, with a
precipice above and below, up which the little horses scrambled;
while big lizards, with green heads and chocolate bodies, looked
pertly at us, and a big bright amber-coloured cobra, as handsome as
he is deadly, wriggled across into a hole.
Nearly all the people in this village are Dutch. There is one
Malay tailor here, but he is obliged to be a Christian at Caledon,
though Choslullah told me with a grin, he was a very good Malay
when he went to Capetown. He did not seem much shocked at this
double religion, staunch Mussulman as he was himself. I suppose
the blacks 'up country' are what Dutch slavery made them - mere
animals - cunning and sulky. The real Hottentot is extinct, I
believe, in the Colony; what one now sees are all 'Bastaards', the
Dutch name for their own descendants by Hottentot women. These
mongrel Hottentots, who do all the work, are an affliction to
behold - debased and SHRIVELLED with drink, and drunk all day long;
sullen wretched creatures - so unlike the bright Malays and cheery
pleasant blacks and browns of Capetown, who never pass you without
a kind word and sunny smile or broad African grin, SELON their
colour and shape of face. I look back fondly to the gracious soft-
looking Malagasse woman who used to give me a chair under the big
tree near Rathfelders, and a cup of 'bosjesthee' (herb tea), and
talk so prettily in her soft voice; - it is such a contrast to these
poor animals, who glower at one quite unpleasantly. All the hovels
I was in at Capetown were very fairly clean, and I went into
numbers. They almost all contained a handsome bed, with, at least,
eight pillows.
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