Having Sent My Family Home To England, I Started In The Beginning Of June,
1852, On My Last Journey From Cape Town.
This journey extended
from the southern extremity of the continent to St. Paul de Loando,
the capital of Angola, on the west coast, and thence across
South Central Africa in an oblique direction to Kilimane (Quilimane)
in Eastern Africa.
I proceeded in the usual conveyance of the country,
the heavy, lumbering Cape wagon drawn by ten oxen, and was accompanied
by two Christian Bechuanas from Kuruman - than whom I never saw
better servants any where - by two Bakwain men, and two young girls,
who, having come as nurses with our children to the Cape,
were returning to their home at Kolobeng. Wagon-traveling in Africa
has been so often described that I need say no more than that
it is a prolonged system of picnicking, excellent for the health,
and agreeable to those who are not over-fastidious about trifles,
and who delight in being in the open air.
Our route to the north lay near the centre of the cone-shaped mass of land
which constitutes the promontory of the Cape. If we suppose this cone
to be divided into three zones or longitudinal bands, we find each presenting
distinct peculiarities of climate, physical appearance and population.
These are more marked beyond than within the colony. At some points
one district seems to be continued in and to merge into the other,
but the general dissimilarity warrants the division, as an aid to memory.
The eastern zone is often furnished with mountains, well wooded
with evergreen succulent trees, on which neither fire nor droughts can have
the smallest effect (`Strelitzia', `Zamia horrida', `Portulacaria afra',
`Schotia speciosa', `Euphorbias', and `Aloes arborescens');
and its seaboard gorges are clad with gigantic timber.
It is also comparatively well watered with streams and flowing rivers.
The annual supply of rain is considerable, and the inhabitants
(Caffres or Zulus) are tall, muscular, and well made;
they are shrewd, energetic, and brave; altogether they merit the character
given them by military authorities, of being "magnificent savages".
Their splendid physical development and form of skull show that,
but for the black skin and woolly hair, they would take rank
among the foremost Europeans.
The next division, that which embraces the centre of the continent,
can scarcely be called hilly, for what hills there are are very low.
It consists for the most part of extensive, slightly undulating plains.
There are no lofty mountains, but few springs, and still fewer
flowing streams. Rain is far from abundant, and droughts
may be expected every few years. Without artificial irrigation
no European grain can be raised, and the inhabitants (Bechuanas),
though evidently of the same stock, originally, with those already mentioned,
and closely resembling them in being an agricultural as well as
a pastoral people, are a comparatively timid race, and inferior to the Caffres
in physical development.
The western division is still more level than the middle one, being rugged
only near the coast. It includes the great plain called the Kalahari Desert,
which is remarkable for little water and very considerable vegetation.
The reason, probably, why so little rain falls on this extensive plain
is that the prevailing winds of most of the interior country are easterly,
with a little southing. The moisture taken up by the atmosphere
from the Indian Ocean is deposited on the eastern hilly slope;
and when the moving mass of air reaches its greatest elevation, it is then
on the verge of the great valley, or, as in the case of the Kalahari,
the great heated inland plains; there, meeting with the rarefied air
of that hot, dry surface, the ascending heat gives it greater capacity
for retaining all its remaining humidity, and few showers can be given
to the middle and western lands in consequence of the increased
hygrometric power.
This is the same phenomenon, on a gigantic scale, as that
which takes place on Table Mountain, at the Cape, in what is called
the spreading of the "table-cloth". The southeast wind causes a mass of air,
equal to the diameter of the mountain, suddenly to ascend
at least three thousand feet; the dilatation produced by altitude,
with its attendant cold, causes the immediate formation of a cloud
on the summit; the water in the atmosphere becomes visible;
successive masses of gliding-up and passing-over air cause the continual
formation of clouds, but the top of the vapory mass, or "table-cloth",
is level, and seemingly motionless; on the lee side, however,
the thick volumes of vapor curl over and descend, but when they reach
the point below, where greater density and higher temperature
impart enlarged capacity for carrying water, they entirely disappear.
Now if, instead of a hollow on the lee side of Table Mountain,
we had an elevated heated plain, the clouds which curl over that side,
and disappear as they do at present when a "southeaster" is blowing,
might deposit some moisture on the windward ascent and top;
but the heat would then impart the increased capacity
the air now receives at the lower level in its descent to leeward,
and, instead of an extended country with a flora of the `Disa grandiflora',
`gladiolus', `rushes', and `lichens', which now appear on Table Mountain,
we should have only the hardy vegetation of the Kalahari.
Why there should be so much vegetation on the Kalahari may be explained
by the geological formation of the country. There is a rim or fringe
of ancient rocks round a great central valley, which, dipping inward,
form a basin, the bottom of which is composed of the oldest silurian rocks.
This basin has been burst through and filled up in many parts
by eruptive traps and breccias, which often bear in their substances
angular fragments of the more ancient rocks, as shown in the fossils
they contain. Now, though large areas have been so dislocated
that but little trace of the original valley formation appears,
it is highly probable that the basin shape prevails over
large tracts of the country; and as the strata on the slopes,
where most of the rain falls, dip in toward the centre, they probably
guide water beneath the plains but ill supplied with moisture from the clouds.
The phenomenon of stagnant fountains becoming by a new and deeper outlet
never-failing streams may be confirmatory of the view that water is conveyed
from the sides of the country into the bottom of the central valley;
and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the wonderful river system
in the north, which, if native information be correct, causes a considerable
increase of water in the springs called Matlomagan-yana (the Links),
extends its fertilizing influence beneath the plains of the Kalahari.
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