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Updated: June 11, 2025
The others stretched their limbs on the Karroo, and in ten minutes every man was in the land of nod. Next day we mounted at daybreak and renewed the hunt, but I will say no more about it than that we bagged twenty-six springboks amongst us, and that Six-foot Johnny, having killed the greatest number of animals, returned home "King of the hunt," with a scrap of ostrich feather in his cap.
He took no note of the country about him, as they passed from veldt to karroo, from karroo to the coast plateau, and from the coast plateau down across the Cape Flats, sparsely covered with pipe grass and acacias. Kruger Bobs eyed him anxiously. "Boss sick," he announced for the dozenth time, as the train drew in at the Adderley Street station. "Boss berry sick mans. Boss go hotel soon."
Many splendid gardens like this exist on what is sometimes styled the barren Karroo; but the land is anything but barren. All it requires is a copious supply of water, and wherever farmers have taken the trouble to form dams and store the heavy though infrequent rains, gardens of the most prolific kind have been the result.
Time passed rapidly, and the settlers, both highland and lowland, struck their roots deeper and deeper into the soil of their adoption watched and criticised more or less amiably by their predecessors, the few Dutch-African farmers who up to that time had struggled on the frontier all alone. One day Hans Marais was riding with Charlie Considine on the karroo, not far from the farm-house.
They were of the Karroo tribe, as they told us by pointing to themselves, and saying, `Karroos', and then they pointed to us, and said `Dutch'. We shot game, and gave it to them, which pleased them very much, and they remained with us for five or six days.
I had no idea that one could get so easily lost in an open plain." "You've had enough experience too, one would think, to have remembered the vastness of the karroo," said Hans, dismounting and making the fastenings of the springbok more secure, "A man soon dwindles to the size of a crow in plains like this, when you gallop away from him.
The Sudan desert with its rocky hills and the broad Nile between the yellow banks is infinitely more picturesque than this vast South African plain. Still, at certain periods of the day and year the Karroo becomes less forbidding to the view.
It reminded me of one of those forgotten little stations in the Karroo. An old station-master was digging in his garden, and with his spade over his shoulder sauntered to the train, took charge of a parcel, and went back to his potatoes. A child of ten received my ticket, and I emerged on a white road that straggled over the brown moor.
Instantly it rolled over, and the hunter flew off its back, turning a complete somersault in the air. A low shrub grows in the karroo, called the ill-tempered thorn. It resembles a mass of miniature porcupine quills, an inch or two in length, planted as thickly as possible together, with the needle-points up and bristling. On one of these shrubs poor Jerry alighted! "Oh!
In Johannesburg is neither rest, nor peace, nor any school for nobility of thought; it destroys the pleasures of the simple, and satisfies not the desires of those whose simplicity is their least striking feature. Upon the veldt and the Karroo, and even through the Mapani scrub country that lies north of Lobatsi, simplicity is the chief characteristic of the scenery.
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