FROM A BACKVELD FARM.
?TIDE camp stands remote hi a mountain-park of Nature's
own making, with the charred ruin of a splendid tree for the centre of a haphazard clearing where man may walk as in a garden in the cool of the homing hour, the tents looking past the tree's memento acorn to the extravagance of a thicket of nameless African trees in Africa's midsummer riot of greenness. Man, whose life is but a span long, might be satisfied with a tent ? Yet its association with drums and tramplings is some- thing of an outrage in this centre of ancient peace ; and the camp is but the prelude to the great adventure of the building of the home-made house in a home-made farm yet to be wrought out of a mountain waste, till now the untroubled home only of buck and rock-rabbit, partridge and hawk, leopard, wild dog, and jackal the unheeded sources of many waters which even yet run to thoughtless waste past man's doors in the fertile buehveld. Stock safely krealed, Kaffirs content with food and leisure for chatter, the burden of the day's heat suddenly a thing of the past, so comes the brief blessed hour of peace on earth. The sun is just down in an angry blaze, reluctant enough to leave these mountain woodlands for the Kalahari and Atlantic wastes. Over the eastern fell the moon sails into sight, her full glory veiled by a stray wisp of cloud from the afternoon's thunder. Truly it is
The land which no man findeth soon, East of the sun, west of the moon."
Up from the valley, swelling and dying in the faint breeze, :gums the chime of a stream new-born in last week's rain. Kids born to-day bleat with a puzzled trouble. Bells chink as the ever-curious donkeys watch through the -wires the mysteries of Kaffir cookery. Felt rather than heard Is the last growl of thunder so appalling in the afternoon. Felt rather than heard is the murmur from the Kaffirs' tent beyond the thicket, a discussion, doubtless, on the inscrutable ways of white men and all women. The staff have company to-night, for His Majesty's Mails came in at dusk, old "January," staggering under a sack of letters, papers, and books, .twenty-five inowdain miles up from a lone minket and to-morrow he tolls on forty mountain miles down to the next, for a bare day's rest before starting back. Meanwhile he and old Piet, whose sufficient library is a Bible and a Speleta Bata, are finding new light on the old text about many books and much learning.
Peace on earth—it needed the afternoon's tempest to make perfect the night's peace. For an hour the heavens and the myth were confounded with tumult, continuous maddening din smothered by bursts of astounding clamour, a steady hectic glare dulled by spasms of intolerable light, the windows of heaven open, the waters upon the boo of the earth, the air vibrating with the rush and reeking with the acrid smell of the lightning. For an hour ; and now a peace which makes one's heart ache to think of one's fellow-men herded to-night in cities like kraaled cattle, while so much of a wide beautiful world cries out for man's masterful companionship. A last delirious cackle of homing partridge is the signal for sleep. Cows, one by one collapsing with a profound sigh, settle at last to ruminate, resigned to man's frantic waste of the cool moonlit grazing hours. Baboons cease their nightly battle for the best bed in the cliff dormitory, grumble a while, and are silent. Count- less doves, puzzled a while by the rich light en long after sundown, cease at last their crooning, and the frogs are left to fill the valley with quiet talk, the traditionary " Brekekekex-koax-koax " of debate relieved in these latitudes by interludes, solo and chorus, of a bubbling musical sound unknown to Aristophanes. Hour by hour the debate continued, with the aimless rattle and shriek of cricket and grasshopper for " noise without " in Parlia- ment Square, till when every Member is talked dry, the Closure is applied, "Who Goes Rome ? " intoned, and dead silence falls just as the night turns in its sleep.
Yet is the silence broken at whiles. A jackal gloating over the grisly remains of a wild dog's meal wakes the baboons to an angry protest against untimely "Reveille," waking a dove, too, to croon for a sleepy moment in the thicket opposite. A hint on the breeze of some stealthy terror of the night wakes the goats to a brief agony of fear. A fall of cliff miles down in the kloof flutters the tent with a vibration beyond the ken of man's senses. A restless donkey clanks his bell, thrilling a chord of memory of all the bells in literature. Galahad in the Great Chapel, the leper's bell in the waste, the priest carrying the Host to a lone deathbed—a night of nighte such as this might set a poet's brain seething. To every sense it is goodly beyond words in the camp clearing, the centre of spacious, undrilled loveliness such as England holds but for the fortunate few, cramped even for them by the consciousness of a horizon of ugliness and noise.
A square mile of matchless park is here ready to hand, when time shall serve to frame it with a-fence. Yonder, between the fell's foot and the summer torrent, flanked on either hand by a forest veteran, screened by giants yet in their youth, stands the beginning of Liberty Hall just visible in the moonlight ; heart-breaking medley of poles as yet, suggesting skeletons of murdered trees rather than the frame of a homely cottage, to be comfortable and sufficient though " built of sticks and mud," like those of our proud forbears at which the Spanish Ambassa- dor sneered. Beyond, again, Liberty Hall, when finished, will look over the slope of another square mile of park and the busy hidden river to a horizon of untrodden mysterious fells, awaiting yet another generation before the tide of man's settlement tames them : waste land, meanwhile, yet not all unprofitable, as the home of the scent the breeze bears to-night, subtle and stimu- lating beyond man's power to imitate, a welcome relief after the sulphurous reek of the storm.
" Flowers without scent " runs the ignorant epigram of some babbling journalist. Truly some of the scents are denied save to a delicate sense ; yet the sununer is a moving procession of flowers to whose daily beauty their night scent seems a wanton addition. A forest tree massed with blossom like a saffron- coloured hawthorn is this month's scent-giver, followed quickly by the "wild peach" trailing at random a deep evergreen spangled with delicate white stars, and the " wild apricot" smaller but no less sweet, while Christmas brings the climax, when the world is white and fragrant with the flowers of the wild orange and its giant cousin the " Baboons' cocoanut." "Birds without song" is less obviously untrue, where night singers are unknown and by day the notes of many suggest rather Bank Holiday revelry in the sunshine than the concert- room. Yet " song " is a poor word if it cannot cover the blue pigeon's daybreak ecstasy, while this evening, when the sun broke through and earth shook off the waters- again, the passion. ate chant of the ringdove against the burden of the hoopoe's monotone surely revealed the source of the dance motif in the Meistersinger.
This building of Liberty Hall in the wilds, this struggling with wild Nature for civilization's foothold, is strenuous work for middle age, yet the sights, the sounds, and the scents of the mountains are a very present help in the hardest corner ; and of us sojourners in the backveld might it have been written: " In the very labour that they lived by lay the material in which their thought could be embodied, and thus, though they la,benred, they laboured somewhat for their pleasure and uncompelled, and had conquered the curse of toil, and were men."
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