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Just then I heard a rumour of an English missionary and his wife and daughter who were said to be living somewhere beyond the boundaries of Natal, in a savage place on the Transvaal side of the Drakensberg, and as some Boers I knew were trekking into that country I came with them on the chance a pretty poor one, as the story was vague enough." "You came you came to seek the girl, Rachel Dove?"
And thus, trekking by night, and resting by day as much as the terrific heat would allow, we worked our tedious way into the heart of the desert; and now the magnitude of the task before me was becoming more fully apparent every day. For, toil as our willing beasts would, it was obvious that each long night's exhausting trek barely carried us ten miles forward as the crow flies.
We climbed one of the numerous hills lying around and called up towards Potchefstroom, but got no reply. As we sat chatting, keeping our eyes fixed on the dark ridges in the distance, one of my companions remarked "This reminds me of a fine trick I played on the English a few months ago. We were trekking along quietly one day when I observed a heliograph glitter on a hill about ten miles away.
Still no grass to be seen, still the bushes bare of their leaves, and barked! The field-cornet began to think that he was trekking right in the way the locusts had come. Westward he was heading for certain; he knew that. But he was not yet certain that the flight had not advanced from the west instead of the north. If so, they might go for days before coming upon a patch of grass!
"Oh, Heer Allan, your father, the Predicant, always warned me against trekking north, and I never would listen to him because I thought him a cursed Englishman; now I see my folly. Heer Allan, if you can, try to save my child from those black devils; if you live longer than I do, or if you can't save her, kill her," and he clasped my hand. "It hasn't come to that yet, Hans," I said.
Yet, strangely enough, the circumstance did not strike me as being in the least peculiar or significant, although Piet, my after-rider, made some passing reference to it. Later on in the afternoon, however, when we had again inspanned, and had been trekking for about an hour, it began to dawn upon me that things were not quite as usual at Bella Vista.
For the first three days we met, on an average, half a dozen wagons a day, trekking to Port Elizabeth from various farms in the outlying districts; but after that they became less numerous, and after the fifth day we met no more, nor did I call at any farms which, at that length from the Bay, were few and far between although we occasionally sighted one in the distance to the right or left of the track we were following.
On the 5th Ermelo was occupied, and the fresh deep ruts upon the veld told the British horsemen of the huge Boer convoy that was ahead of them. For days enormous herds, endless flocks, and lines of wagons which stretched from horizon to horizon had been trekking eastward. Cavalry and mounted infantry were all hot upon the scent.
People starve when trekking vast distances through wastelands without food to eat, they starved in concentration camps, buried in mind disasters, they starve during famines and starve while being tortured in prisons.
Later on, after a meal and a rest, we again inspanned, and, trekking a few miles upstream, rounded the shoulder of a range of low hills and plunged into a valley stretching northward, with a small southward-flowing stream running through its centre and discharging into the Zambezi, upon which splendid river we now turned our backs.
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