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The lanterns, swinging underneath, were cleaned and filled and put back on their hooks. At first Tim had hung on the outskirts of the crowd. But it was impossible to resist for long the glamour of these preparations. The trek wagon, the tents, the night lanterns, all helped to stir his quick blood.
Burnham told them who he was and, as he intended to escape, offered to take back to head-quarters their names or any messages they might wish to send to their people. As twenty yards behind the wagon in which they lay was a mounted guard, the officers told him escape was impossible. He proved otherwise. The trek wagon was drawn by sixteen oxen and driven by a Kaffir boy.
They retained their weapons by burying them, pacifying the confiding British officer in charge of the district by handing in rusty and obsolete Martini-Henris or a venerable blunderbuss which nobody had used since ancestral Boer shot lions with it in the mediæval days of the first great trek. The buried Mausers came in very useful afterwards.
The argot is Dutch and Kaffir, and every one can hum the national anthem that begins 'Pack your kit and trek, Johnny Bowlegs. In the stately Hongkong Clubhouse, which is to the further what the Bengal Club is to the nearer East, you meet much the same gathering, minus the mining speculators and plus men whose talk is of tea, silk, shortings, and Shanghai ponies.
The Battery swung into the great high road whose sign-post said, 'To Ewell and Epsom. Another unit had been halted to let the Artillery pass into its definitive place in the vast trek. It was about this time that George began to notice the dust.
And at the end of the long trek there awaited him monotonous months in a wretched coal camp far from all the comforts of civilization. No wonder he grumbled. But though he grumbled at home and at the club and on the street about his coming exile, Selfridge made no complaints to Macdonald. That man of steel had no sympathy with the yearnings for the fleshpots.
At 6.30 P.M. the orders arrived. We were to trek northwards, about four thousand yards as the crow flies, and be in touch with our C.R.A. early next morning. That night rain fell in torrents. When we had dined, and all the kit had been packed up, we sheltered in the gun-pit, awaiting our horses and the baggage-waggons.
The upshot was that we decided to trek to the Oliphant's River, camp there and explore the bush on the other side on horseback, never going so far from the wagon that we could not reach it again before nightfall. This, then, we did, outspanning that evening by the hot but beautiful river which was still haunted by a few hippopotamus and many crocodiles, one of which we shot before turning in.
Wrenn, you bad man, do come sit down and tell me all about your wonderful trek with Istra Nash. I just met dear Istra in the upper hall. Poor dear, she was so crumpled, but her hair was like a sunset over mountain peaks you know, as Yeats says: "A stormy sunset were her lips, A stormy sunset on doomed ships,
The southern one, drawn in by its fiercer neighbour, was still true to the cause. And so, too, the Dutch of the Colony were exactly to-day where they had been sixty years ago. They could no more join the war than they could join the trek. And, in spite of individual appeals to relations, &c., you may be sure that the northerners knew pretty accurately how the land lay. Their own action shows this.
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