Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The second phase of the Free State Rebellion was a pantomime more than anything else; a week's pantomime acted in the open veld in rain that never stopped. It was the most miserable week I have known. We left Upington on the 29th of November, reaching Kroonstad, Orange Free State, late next evening.
They were all sketches of the veld, high and low; of natives; of bits of Dutch architecture; of the stoep with its Boer farmer and his vrouw; of a kopje with a dozen horses or a herd of cattle grazing; of a spruit, or a Kaffir's kraal; of oxen leaning against the disselboom of a cape-wagon; of a herd of steinboks, or a little colony of meerkats in the karoo.
In truth she was Nature's child, if in a better and a purer sense than Byron uses that description. The sea, the veld, the sky, the forest and the river, these were her companions, for among them she dwelt solitary. Their denizens, too, knew her well, for unless she were driven to it, never would she lift her hand against anything that drew the breath of life.
If my horse fails, why, we will loot another on the road. We do not take the spoor, we slip across the veld; my mount treads gingerly, but what odds? After to-day he shall rest for a week! We near the town. Everything is deathly quiet. Where is our commando? Cautiously we enter the streets, riding far apart, rifles ready. Halt! here comes a horseman. Don't fire, he is unarmed. Why, 'tis but a boy!
Saxham thought of the strip of veld between there and the Hospital, even more fraught with peril than the patch he had just traversed, or the distance yet to be covered between the Sisters' bombproof and the Women's Laager, where Death, with the red sickle in his fleshless hand, stalked openly from dawn to nightfall. "From the Convent, carrying it across after dark.
The wonderful effect of the dry air of the Cape peninsula, and of the drier air of the High Veld in cases of tuberculosis is a matter of common knowledge, for was not Cecil Rhodes himself a standing example of an almost miraculous recovery?
Her veil fluttered in the hot November breeze that bore with it the heavy fetid taint from the overcrowded trenches that ringed Gueldersdorp, and the acrid fumes of the cordite; though the air up here on the veld was sweet compared with the befouled atmosphere of the Women's Laager and the crowded wards at the Hospital, in spite of all that disinfectants could do.
Many years previously the wheels of the old voortrekkers had passed that way, bringing from Cape Colony, with the household gods, goods and chattels, language and customs of the Dutch, the slips of the pomegranate and peach and orange trees, whose abundant blossoming dressed the orchards of the farms tucked away here and there in the lap of the veld, with bridal white and pink, and hung their girdling pomegranate hedges with stars of ruby red.
When you see this catch a glimpse of it suddenly where it stands on the veld outside the town you get a thrill of sheer astonishment. The thing seems monstrous there. It is foreign to our ideas a wireless colossus in such a place. Had I seen this vast piece of work in a humming city that stands warden to the seas it would have fitted in. But where it is well, it just surprised.
Stafford went on, jerking a finger towards the other room. "They are from the veld. They will have you as sure as the crack of a whip. This is England, but they are from the veld. On the veld you know what they would do to you. If you speak against the Baas, it is bad for you; if you speak against the Baas' vrouw it will be ten times worse. Do you hear?"
Word Of The Day