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Updated: June 3, 2025
Charley gave a characteristic description of this country, when he returned from a ride in search of game: "It is a miserable country! nothing to shoot at, nothing to look at, but box trees and anthills." The box-forest was, however, very open and the grass was good; and the squatter would probably form a very different opinion of its merits.
I do not know why we have so few green woodpeckers by the river, as there are plenty of old trees there; but these birds, which feed chiefly on the ground among the anthills, have a marked preference for such woods in the neighbourhood as contain an abundance of oak trees. The local name for these birds is "hic-wall," which Tom Peregrine pronounces "heckle."
The fire is surrounded by masses of anthills, and in these there are hollows made to receive the melted metal: the metal is poured while the pot is held with the hands, protected by wet rags. 15th August, 1868. Bin Omar, a Suaheli, came from Muaboso on Chambezé in six days, crossing in that space twenty-two burns or oozes, from knee to waist deep. Very high and cold winds prevail at present.
But the Grass overbore the heavy artillery, the flamethrowers, the bombs, the radium, and all the devices in its path. The inventions of war whose constant improvement was the pride of the human race offered no more obstacle to the Grass than a few anthills might to a herd of stampeding elephants.
There were no reserves to give a fresh impetus to the attack, and the thin scattered line, behind bullet-spotted stones or anthills, could but hold its own while the sun sank slowly upon a day which will not be forgotten by those who endured it. The Boers were reinforced in the afternoon, and the pressure became so severe that the field guns were retired with much difficulty.
Dampier says: "There were several things like haycocks standing in the Savannah, which at a distance we thought were houses, looking just like the Hottentots' houses at the Cape of Good Hope; but we found them to be so many rocks." Dampier and his companions may have mistaken some anthills for rocks.
The delirium increased with age, and most of the adult natives showed it by eating dirt, sleeping on dunghills, pummeling anthills with rocks even as the ants bit them severely, and jumping out of trees onto their heads. This last maneuver caused the natives to stagger around senseless for days, or simply to lie unconscious and bleeding in the sun and rain.
We entered the town of Prato about five o'clock in the evening, and found it crammed to the walls with sightseers and those who expected to offer them sights. The Piazza was like the camp about a fair, the inns were like anthills, the very churches were full. On the morrow was to be the great procession of religious to enact the translation of the remains.
Lacerda died, the Casembe moved to near the north end of the Mofwé. There have been seven Casembes in all. The word means a general. The plain extending from the Lundé to the town of Casembe is level, and studded pretty thickly with red anthills, from 15 to 20 feet high. Casembe has made a broad path from his town to the Lundé, about a mile-and-a-half long, and as broad as a carriage-path.
Taking the wind, we carefully approached their position. The ground was very rough, being a complete city of anthills about two feet high; these were overgrown with grass, giving the open country an appearance of a vast churchyard of turf graves.
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