Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/153

Rh grown with success where the farmer has sufficient capital to await the time necessary to get a crop, but the cost of transportation prevents export in competition with the fruits produced in other parts of the world. It is well known that a great effort has been made by the government to get the Boers back on their farms, and we saw one example of this in the new houses which have been built near the roofless walls of every old one that we passed. For the Dutch settler is in general the only class which has so far succeeded in extracting a living out of the land, partly owing to his few needs and his content with meager surroundings, but he is in some ways an obstacle to development by his constitutional dislike to any alteration of the methods handed down to him from his ancestors.

On every side were to be seen evidences of the long-continued guerilla warfare; block houses perched on the hills, sometimes in long rows a mile or two apart, at other times in isolated places; an occasional area covered with rusty tin cans showing where a concentration camp had been situated; skeletons of cattle and mules along the roadside; an acre of the whitened bones of oxen, the scene of the destruction of a convoy caught in a trap. Many of the pleasures and troubles of trekking were experienced. The night under the open sky on the veld, various breakdowns and minor accidents, the hot noon suns and cold starlit skies, the clouds of red dust raised by the mules—all combined to give some idea of that fascination for traveling in Africa which has so often been the theme in stories of fact and fiction.