United States or Malawi ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The party said very little, but their eyes told that the fascination had crept into their hearts already, though they could only appreciate in silence, wondering, perhaps, why they felt this strong attraction for a land that was chiefly kopjes and veldt.
This is a bad plan, as young and immature mares breed early on the veldt, and throw weedy stock. Their cattle, however, are attended to on much better lines, and most of the beef that I have seen would do credit to any station in Australia, or any American ranch. They mostly raise a few sheep and goats; the sheep are a poor lot, the wool is of a very inferior class, and the mutton poor.
Their original cause was a sortie early in the siege, when Captain Fitzclarence made a night attack with the bayonet on their trenches. Ever afterwards an animal moving on the veldt, a tree or bush stirred by the wind, an unusual light in the town, was sufficient for volley after volley to be poured at imaginary foes.
My experiences in many lands in dear distant England; in India and China; in the forests of Manchuria, Kashmir, and Sikkim; in the desert of Gobi and the South African veldt; in the Himalaya mountains; and on many an ocean voyage; and experiences with such varied peoples as the Chinese and Boers, Tibetans and Mahrattas, Rajputs and Kirghiz seemed all summed up in that moment.
Joost twelve miles a day till the apricots are ripe. "Then we hitched on to his outposts, and vedettes, and cossack-picquets, or whatever they was called, and we wandered around the veldt arm in arm like brothers. "The way we worked lodge was this way. The General, he had his breakfast at 8:45 A.M. to the tick. He might have been a Long Island commuter.
Now it was a hospital train which halted at the camp on the way southward, and each red-taped nurse had reminded him of Alice Mellen, and of those last days in Johannesburg. Now it was a two-day trek, as escort for a convoy train whose long lines of bullock-drawn wagons marked the brown veldt with a wavering stripe of duller brown.
It began at a hole inside a hut, and ran underground for quite forty yards, to a point about five yards outside the enclosure. Some of our chaps passed through it. In a large tin shed near the enclosure was a fine electric-lighting plant for lighting this strange prison on the open veldt. This morning the Captain came back, to our great delight.
Scarred from muzzle to pastern by errant bullets, limping slightly on one fore leg, she still had borne her master bravely over weary miles of veldt, into many a skirmish and through the kicking, squealing throngs of her kindred which crowded the Lindley kraal. Long since, Weldon had discovered that the thoroughbred Nig was an ornament; but that Piggie was a necessity.
This wall was between four and five feet in height and half a yard across in its weakest place an ugly barricade in itself behind which a few resolute men with quick-firing rifles, which they know how to use, could make a good stand against vastly superior numbers advancing upon them from the open veldt.
It was even said that General Botha had received an invitation from the British Government to come and arrange a Peace on "independence" lines. Nobody will doubt that we on the veldt were desperately anxious to hear the glad tidings of Peace.