MARGINAL COMMENTS
By LAWRENCE ATHILL WHEN General Smuts, as is his habit, gives to the world some basic truth crystallised in an arresting phrase, he borrows his genius from the great continent which, most deceptively, has been called dark. For Africa really is the reverse of dark. It has dark patches, belts of sunless forest and streaks of superstitious cruelty, but on the whole it is a land of revelation. Its plains and deserts, titanic rifts and naked mountain masses expose the truths of nature on the grandest scale, aril African humanity, shamed into straight- forwardness by its surroundings, follows suit.
The African, for instance, gives the stomach its right importance. If a man is surly or ill-conditioned, his neigh- bours make no bones about it. His stomach, they say, is bad. A follower of mine, found hiding beneath a rock at a critical moment of the chase, explained that his " tumbo " had gone " hivi-hivi." If you remember that the Kisuahili " i " has an Italian value, you need be no Bantu scholar to understand the excuse, even if you reject it. And nowhere is the African more perspicuous than in his coining of names.
Most Europeans in Africa have native names, and seldom such as they themselves would choose. One that I knew tried desperately for twenty years to be "My Lord the Lion," but ended, as he started, "Master Ant." His soreness on the point was quite unreasonable, for it is by ants and not by lions that mountains are removed, and mountains play a large part in African imagery. No critic's encomium ever pleased Rider Haggard half so much as did the knowledge that, to the Zulus, he was" the man who walks on the mountains."
General Smuts, the greatest of Africans, knows the message of the mountains. I once heard him speaking to an audience of schoolboys whose school lay on a foothill of the Drakens- berg. Behind it the country rose in terraces to the buttress of the Berg, and before it, far below, lovely Natal stretched towards the sea in countless undulations. That view, said General Smuts, was the boys' greatest heritage. When, as they must, the years brought moments of disillusion, doubt and puzzle, it would always be within their power to climb in memory to that eyrie in the hills, to look out again over that vast and lovely prospect. Then they would see things in their true proportion. The little things would become little : the great ones, great.
So, though less happily, thought my poor friend Herr Kappa, with whom I strolled one sweltering evening in the bush that ringed his camp. Pausing to mop his forehead, he cast his longing eyes towards the hills. "A h, Herr Major," he said, "it is only on the mountains that a man thinks lovely thoughts ! " I was too ignorant to know whether he was quoting or original, but my heart bled for him ; for Herr Kappa was immensely fat, and I felt that he would never think a lovely thought again without the aid of a funicular. It was not until I myself stood one evening at sunset, alone upon a solitary outpost of the Abyssinian high- lands, looking out across the darkening distance of the vast Nilotic plain, that I knew my error.
Then I realised that no funicular could help Herr Kappa, for funiculars bring crowds, and crowds on mountain tops are sacrilege. Yet there was hope for him, for of course the mountain that matters is the one each man builds for himself, which he alone can climb. Of such a mountain Robert Bridges thought when, "late in his long journey," he wrote "resting on some hill-top to view the plain he has left. .. a landscape so by beauty estranged he scarce will ken familiar haunts, nor his own home maybe, where far it lieth, smaU as a faded thought."
Surely this mountain -is the true measure of a man's life. No little mortal judgement can have power to touch him who. from a height reared by his own thoughts and deeds, when the night falls can look serenely into the great quietness of the unknown and, in the golden clearness of the afterglow, can see the distant mountains of the morning.
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