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It is in this desolate country that Johannesburg, the Golden City, sprang up, as it were, like a fungus, almost in a night. Nine years previously the Rand since the theatre of so much excitement and disappointment the source of a great part of the wealth of London at the present day, was as innocent of buildings and as peaceful in appearance as those lonely plains over which we had travelled.
I began to wonder about the life-history of this fungus, how it looked and how it germinated and how it grew and wrought its destructive influence. It was not long before I found myself spending some of my leisure moments in the library trying to find out what was known concerning this subject.
The women, in crimson gowns caught up to the waist, their luxuriant hair adorned with flowers and phosphorescent fungus, their necks hung with the pink peppers of Chile, squatted in a close ring about the players. The lame man took up the pack, shuffled it, and handed it to Kivi to cut. Then Kivi solemnly stacked before him the eighty-five packets of matches, all that remained in the islands.
Green things venture timidly out of the parched earth, then shoot up as rapidly as the beanstalk of the fairy tale. But inside houses dampness reigns. Green fungus adorns boots and all things of leather, tobacco reeks with moisture, and the white man scratches himself and curses the plague of prickly heat.
Over many of them hung thick curtains of cobwebs and dust; white fungus cropped in the cracks; the rats seemed everywhere. Now and then he caught sight of a shredded arras on the walls; in one room a disordered bed; on the floor of another a woman's glove. Never a sight of life but rats, and never a sound but his own steps, the shrieking of the wind, the rattle of crazy windows.
He had received by mail from California a small box containing a hundred or more dead bees, accompanied by a letter. The writer, an old bee-keeper, had experience, and desired enlightenment and advice. The letter stated that his bees were "dying by thousands from the attacks of a peculiar fungus."
This fungus, called Sclerotium sp., or "Rolf's Sclerotium," is noteworthy because it attacks potatoes, squash, cowpea, and a long list of other garden vegetables and ornamental plants. The only satisfactory means of control is rotation of crops, using corn, small grain, and the Iron cowpea, a variety immune to this and other diseases.
I tried to lay my hand on his arm and explain this to him, but the issue was too subtle for his brain. It was also unexpectedly difficult to express. After a momentary attempt to understand me I remember wondering if the fungus had made my eyes as fishy as his he set off upon some observations on his own account.
High temper may be dangerous, and the rough hand something to be avoided and reprobated; but there is something worse in the extreme opposite, and humanity worse sickens at the sight of an abject poltroon, than at any other worthless fungus that springs as an excrescence from God's footstool. All the saints be praised for these little women!
They soon stood on the verge of the Awful River which was filled with the filth and slimy putrefaction of the world, the fungus growth of society, and the scum of all nationalities. From these currents came unearthly sounds, doleful lamentations, melancholy and hopeless.
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