Lady Lucie Duff Gordon

“ If I could have dreamed of waiting here so long, I would have run up to Algoa Bay or East London by sea, and had a glimpse of Caffreland. Capetown makes me very languid—there is something depressing in the air—but my cough is much better. I can’t walk here without feeling knocked-up; and cab-hire is so dear; and somehow, nothing is worth while, when one is waiting from day to day. So I have spent more money than when I was most amused, in being bored. ”

“ She, poor soul, carries a bundle on her head, which few men could lift. If I admire the babies, the poor women are enchanted;—du reste, if you look at blacks of any age or sex, they must grin and nod, as a good-natured dog must wag his tail; they can’t help it. The blacks here (except a very few Caffres) are from the Mozambique—a short, thick-set, ugly race, with wool in huge masses; but here and there one sees a very pretty face among the women. The men are beyond belief hideous. There are all possible crosses—Dutch, Mozambique, Hottentot and English, ‘alles durcheinander’ ”

“ A maid is really a superfluity on board ship, as the men rather like being ‘aux petits soins’. The boatswain came the other day to say that he had a nice carpet and a good pillow; did I want anything of the sort? He would be proud that I should use anything of his. You would delight in Avery, my cuddy man, who is as quick as ‘greased lightning’, and full of fun. His misery is my want of appetite, and his efforts to cram me are very droll. The days seem to slip away, one can’t tell how. I sit on deck from breakfast at nine, till dinner at four, and then again till it gets cold, and then to bed. ”

“ The drive to Simon’s Bay was lovely, along the coast and across five beaches of snow-white sand, which look like winter landscapes; and the mountains and bay are lovely.
Living is very dear, and washing, travelling, chemist’s bills—all enormous. Thirty shillings a cart and horse from Rathfelder here—twelve miles; and then the young English host wanted me to hire another cart for one box and one bath! But I would not, and my obstinacy was stoutest. If I want cart or waggon again, I’ll deal with a Malay, only the fellows drive with forty Jehu-power up and down the mountains. ”

“ Then comes a cloud over Table Mountain, like the sugar on a wedding-cake, which tumbles down in splendid waterfalls, and vanishes unaccountably halfway; and then you run indoors and shut doors and windows, or it portends a ‘south-easter’, i.e. a hurricane, and Capetown disappears in impenetrable clouds of dust. But this wind coming off the hills and fields of ice, is the Cape doctor, and keeps away cholera, fever of every sort, and all malignant or infectious diseases. Most of them are unknown here. Never was so healthy a place ”

“ At Gnadenthal they understood Dutch, and spoke it tolerably; but here, as in most places, it is three-parts Hottentot; and then they affect to understand English, and bring everything wrong, and are sulky: but the rooms are very comfortable. The change of climate is complete—the summer was over at Caledon, and here we are into it again—the most delicious air one can conceive; it must have been a perfect oven six weeks ago. The birds are singing away merrily still; the approach of autumn does not silence them here. ”

“ Another cart full of working men, with a Malay driver; and inside are jumbled some red-haired, rosy-cheeked English navvies, with the ugliest Mozambiques, blacker than Erebus, and with faces all knobs and corners, like a crusty loaf. As we drive home we see a span of sixteen noble oxen in the market-place, and on the ground squats the Hottentot driver. ”

“ All is young, fresh, serene, beautiful, and cheerful.
We have not seen a sail for weeks. But the life at sea makes amends for anything, to my mind. I am never tired of the calms, and I enjoy a stiff gale like a Mother Carey’s chicken, so long as I can be on deck or in the captain’s cabin. ”

“ The old Spanish Joe Miller about selling the bridge to buy water occurred to me, and made Sabaal laugh immensely. The Dutch farmers were tearing home from Kerk, in their carts—well-dressed, prosperous-looking folks, with capital horses. Such lovely farms, snugly nestled in orange and pomegranate groves! It is of no use to describe this scenery; it is always mountains, and always beautiful opal mountains; quite without the gloom of European mountain scenery. The atmosphere must make the charm. I hear that an English traveller went the same journey and found all barren from Dan to Beersheba. ”

“ I am persecuted by the ugliest and blackest Mozambiquer I have yet seen, a bricklayer’s labourer, who can speak English, and says he was servant to an English Captain—‘Oh, a good fellow he was, only he’s dead!’ He now insists on my taking him as a servant. ‘I dessay your man at home is a good chap, and I’ll be a good boy, and cook very nice.’ He is thick-set and short and strong. Nature has adorned him with a cock eye and a yard of mouth, and art, with a prodigiously tall white chimney-pot hat with the crown out, a cotton nightcap, and a wondrous congeries of rags. ”

“ The sea to-day is littered all round the ship with our floating rubbish, so we have not moved at all.
I constantly long for you to be here, though I am not sure you would like the life as well as I do. All your ideas of it are wrong; the confinement to the poop and the stringent regulations would bore you. But then, sitting on deck in fine weather is pleasure enough, without anything else. In a Queen’s ship, a yacht, or a merchantman with fewer passengers, it must be a delightful existence. ”

“ The girls occupy the school in the morning, and the boys in the afternoon; half a day is found quite enough of lessons in this climate. The infant school was of both sexes, but a different set morning and afternoon. The missionaries’ children were in the infant school; and behind the little blonde German ‘Mädels’ three jet black niggerlings rolled over each other like pointer-pups, and grinned, and didn’t care a straw for the spelling; while the dingy yellow little bastaards were straining their black eyes out, with eagerness to answer the master’s questions. ”

“ The Farnese Hercules is a living truth. I saw him in the street two days ago, and he was a Caffre coolie. The proportions of the head and throat were more wonderful in flesh, or muscle rather, than in marble. I know a Caffre girl of thirteen, who is a noble model of strength and beauty; such an arm—larger than any white woman’s—with such a dimple in her elbow, and a wrist and hand which no glove is small enough to fit—and a noble countenance too. ”

“ February 18th.—I expect to receive the letters by the English mail to-morrow morning, and to go to Worcester on Thursday. On Saturday the young doctor—good-humoured, jolly, big, young Dutchman—drove me, with his pretty little greys, over to two farms; at one I ate half a huge melon, and at the other, uncounted grapes. We poor Europeans don’t know what fruit can be, I must admit. The melon was a foretaste of paradise, and the grapes made one’s fingers as sticky as honey, and had a muscat fragrance quite inconceivable. ”

“ These winds last all the summer, till February or March. I am told when they don’t blow it is heavenly, though still cold in the mornings and evenings. No one must be out at, or after sunset, the chill is so sudden. Many of the people here declare that it is death to weak lungs, and send their poitrinaires to Madeira, or the south of France. They also swear the climate is enervating, but their looks, and above all the blowsy cheeks and hearty play of the English children, disprove that; and those who come here consumptive get well in spite of the doctors, who won’t allow it possible. ”

“ She has huge eyes with the spiritual look he gives to them, and is exquisite in every way. When the Hottentot blood is handsome, it is beautiful; there is a delicacy and softness about some of the women which is very pretty, and the eyes are those of a good dog. Most of them are hideous, and nearly all drink; but they are very clean and honest. Their cottages are far superior in cleanliness to anything out of England, except in picked places, like some parts of Belgium; and they wash as much as they can, with the bad water-supply, and the English outcry if they strip out of doors to bathe. ”

“ It blew all yesterday, and having rather a sore-throat I stayed in bed, and to-day is all bright and beautiful. But Capetown looks murky after Caledon and Worcester; there is, to my eyes, quite a haze over the mountains, and they look far off and indistinct. All is comparative in this world, even African skies. At Caledon, the most distant mountains, as far as your eye can reach, look as clear in every detail as the map on your table—an appearance utterly new to European eyes. ”

“ The noble oxen, with their huge horns (nine or ten feet from tip to tip) , are never fed, though they work hard, nor are the sheep. The horses get a little forage (oats, straw and all) . I should like you to see eight or ten of these swift wiry little horses harnessed to a waggon,—a mere flat platform on wheels. In front stands a wild-looking Hottentot, all patches and feathers, and drives them best pace, all ‘in hand’, using a whip like a fishing-rod, with which he touches them, not savagely, but with a skill which would make an old stage-coachman burst with envy to behold. ”

“ Hitherto we have had nothing nearly so hot as Paris in summer, or as the summer of 1859 in England; and they say it is no hotter, except when the hot wind blows, which is very rare. Up here, snow sometimes lies, in winter, on the mountain tops; but ice is unknown, and Table Mountain is never covered with snow. The flies are pestilent—incredibly noisy, intrusive, and disgusting—and oh, such swarms! Fleas and bugs not half so bad as in France, as far as my experience goes, and I have poked about in queer places. ”

“ When I have done my visit to Simon’s Bay, I will go ‘up country’, to Stellenbosch, Paarl and Worcester, perhaps. If I can find people going in a bullock-waggon, I will join them; it costs £1 a day, and goes twenty miles. If money were no object, I would hire one with Caffres to hunt, as well as outspan and drive, and take a saddle-horse. There is plenty of pleasure to be had in travelling here, if you can afford it. The scenery is quite beyond anything you can imagine in beauty. I went to a country house at Rondebosch with the J—s, and I never saw so lovely a spot. ”

“ But Choslullah was right; they were perfectly clean, with heaps of beautiful pillows; and not only none of the creatures of which he spoke with infinite terror, but even no fleas. The man was delighted to talk to me. His wife had almost forgotten German, and the children did not know a word of it, but spoke Dutch and English. A fine, healthy, happy family. It was a pretty picture of emigrant life. Cattle, pigs, sheep, and poultry, and pigeons innumerable, all picked up their own living, and cost nothing; and vegetables and fruit grow in rank abundance where there is water. ”

“ The Mantatees, whom I cannot distinguish from Caffres, are scattered all over the colony, and rival the English as workmen and labourers—fine stalwart, industrious fellows. Our little ‘boy’ Kleenboy hires a room for fifteen shillings a month, and takes in his compatriots as lodgers at half a crown a week—the usurious little rogue! His chief, one James, is a bricklayer here, and looks and behaves like a prince. It is fine to see his black arms, ornamented with silver bracelets, hurling huge stones about. ”

“ The weather to-day is just like very warm April at home—showery, sunshiny, and fragrant; most lovely. It is so odd to see an autumn without dead leaves: only the oaks lose theirs, the old ones drop without turning brown, and the trees bud again at once. ”

“ No attempt is made to search out, under external differences, the proofs of a common nature; no attempt to trace the streams of human affections in their course through channels unlike those marked out among ourselves; no attempt to discover what there may be of good mingled with obvious evil, or concealed under appearances which excite our surprise and antipathy. ”

“ The Hottentots, as they are called—that is, those of mixed Dutch and Hottentot origin (correctly, ‘bastaards’) —have a sort of blackguard elegance in their gait and figure which is peculiar to them; a mixture of negro or Mozambique blood alters it altogether. The girls have the elegance without the blackguard look; all are slender, most are tall; all graceful, all have good hands and feet; some few are handsome in the face and many very interesting-looking. ”

“ One can just sit without a fire. Presently, all will be green and gay; for winter is here the season of flowers, and the heaths will cover the country with a vast Turkey carpet. Already the green is appearing where all was brown yesterday. To-day is Good Friday; and if Christmas seemed odd at Midsummer, Easter in autumn seems positively unnatural. ”