United States or Liberia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
We used to ride out sometimes after steenboks, small brown creatures, that made little show when bagged, but then there were huge and horrid vultures to remind one of the sandy desert, and there were pauws gigantic birds that were splendid eating; and the very thought that I trod on land which little more than quarter of a century back had been marked by the print of the royal lion was in itself sufficient to arouse unwonted interest, which was increased by the knowledge of the fact that the kloofs or glens and gorges of the blue hills on the horizon were at that time the natural homes of leopards or "Cape-tigers" and huge baboons.
Around on every hand stretched a brilliant, sun-kissed picture of rugged mountain slopes, scored deeply by the storms of ages; deep kloofs, precipitous of side, shaggy with their vesture of dense bush, and mysterious with their broad masses of dark shadow; rolling uplands, dotted here and there with clumps of timber and bush or with our grazing flocks of sheep and herds of cattle and horses, sweeping gently down toward the wide-stretching, bush-clad plains, through which wound tiny spruits, like threads of silver, hurrying to lose themselves in the broader waters of the Great Fish River.
The 21st Battery Field Artillery, out in comparatively open ground beyond Range Post, swept with shrapnel the slopes and kloofs of Mounted Infantry Hill on one side, and Major Goulburn's battery, the 42nd, searched the reverse slope of that knoll, smiting the head of a movement by which our foes tried to strengthen their attack.
He was a stout active impulsive young fellow, with the look of a capable Nimrod. "You'd have been better with a fowling-piece, or even a Dutch roer," said Rivers, casting a doubtful look at the blunderbuss as they entered the jungle and began to ascend one of the nearest subsidiary glens or kloofs. "Well now, sir," said Jerry respectfully, "I don't agree with you.
The road led across a steep mountain and through thickly grown kloofs, which prevented us from reaching the enemy until they had burnt all the houses, destroyed the seed plants, and loaded the families on their carts, after which they withdrew to the camp at Kruger's Post. We at once charged the enemy's rearguard, and a heavy fight followed, which, however, was of short duration.
If the supports swarming thickly in Bester's Valley and the kloofs behind Mounted Infantry Hill had come on with anything like the determination shown by the intrepid 500 who first seized Waggon Hill, there must have been many anxious moments for our General.
Here we began farming with about eight hundred sheep, and a few head of cattle. The farm contained long, gentle, undulating slopes, divided by shallow kloofs full of forest. The pasturage was rich and water was plentiful. But our farming was not successful; it was hardly possible that it could have been so. Farming is a trade, and has to be learnt.
Well it was that they did so, for it seems that the searchers had already sought them in the very kloof where they were hidden, without seeing anything of them behind the thick screen of the mimosas, and having once sought doubtless they would have returned there no more, for the hills are wide and the kloofs in them many.
Delicate ferns and dew-gemmed pitcher-plants would quiver there, and the spikes of the many-coloured gladioli would thrust from the earth like spears; and the sweet-scented clematis and the passion-vine would trail and blossom in rose and white and purple on the edges of the kloofs and gorges, every stem and leaf and bud and blossom growing and rejoicing in the balmy breeze and the glorious June sunshine; the cruel, lashing rains, the devastating floods, and the burning droughts forgotten as though they had never been.
The officer was anxious to get his men out of these dark kloofs in daylight. He therefore ordered them to ascend in two bodies. They did so, reached the cave, and rushed to the entrance, from which Bezuidenhout fired, but without effect, the muzzle of his rifle having been thrown up. At the same moment one of the soldiers fired into the cavern, and shot the farmer dead on the spot.
Word Of The Day