Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 January 1892 — THE AFRICAN BUSH. [ARTICLE]

THE AFRICAN BUSH.

A Land Where Silence and Heat Are Frightful. To sco this land typically ono should outspun one's wagon on the top of d height ou a summer's midday. Not a creature stirs anywhere, ana tho san pours down its rays on the flaccid dustcovered leaves of the bushes. When tho driver bus gone to lio down behind the hushes ami the leader is gone to take-the oxen to water, if you stand up alone on the chest ut the front of the wagon and look out you will see as far as your eye can reach over hills and dales the silent, motionless hot bush stretching. Not a sound is to bo heard, and the heat is so intense your hand blisters on tho tent of the wagon where you liave rested it, only from a clump of bush at your right a cicada sets up its keen, slirill cry, glorying in the heat and solitude of the bush. Not less characteristically do you see it whoa ns a little child you travel through it in the night. The ox wagon creeps slowly along the Hundv road. 'The driver, walking beside it calls at intervals to his tired oxen; wo look out across tho wagon ohest nnd see us tho wagon moves along how the dark outlines of tbo hushes on either sid seem to move, too; a great clump seems coming nearer like a vast animal; the shapes are magnificent by tho dark. We croop closer down behind tho wagon chest and look out across it. Against the dark night, sky to our right, on tho ridge of the hill, are tho gaunt forms of aloes standing like a row of men keeping watch. We remember all tho stories we have heard of Kafir wars and men shot and stabbod as thoy passed along tho hillsides, and of wild animals, and wo creep down lower; then a will-o’-the-wisp comes out from some dried-up torront lied and far before us dances in and out among the clumps of bush, now in sight and now out again. You are glad when tho people in the wagon begin to sing hymns, aud inoro glad yet when at 9.30 the wagon stops, drawn up against a groat clump of luisli at the roadside. The .tired oxen are taken out from tho yoke and every one climbs out und a fire is lighted,uih! you gather from far and wide stumps of dried elephant’s food and euphorbia what you can drag in one bund, and bits of branch , and dry twig, aud throw them on tho tiro: tho flame leaps higher and higher and all sit down beside the ruddy blaze. Away iieliip] another bush tho driver und luador have lighted their tire and are talking to each other in Kafir as they boil the coffee and grill the megt. Tho blaze of your own tiro leaps up and illumes tho great and dusty body of the wugou with its white sails and glints on tliu horns of the tired oxen where they lio tied to their yokos, ohewing the cud, and on the bush with its dark green leaves behind you, and you laugfh aud talk aud forgot the stories of Kafir wars | and the great bush stretching about you. —[Fortnightly Review.