Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/258

 live in round, grass-covered huts, and are a shiftless lot. If other portions of Africa are as promising agriculturally as Natal and the Transvaal (and certain parts are said to be better), I can easily believe it has a great future. But it should be remembered that this is the rainy season; in a few months the country will look brown and parched. There is plenty of rain along the coast, but in the interior, people long for rain as they do in Australia At one place along the road, we saw a family of Kaffirs going to town in a light wagon to which was attached three yoke of oxen. Goats and donkeys, the live-stock of shiftless men everywhere, were quite numerous along the way Near Durban we saw young corn and young bananas growing together. A half-dozen miles from Durban we saw a huge sugar-mill, and surrounding it a Hindu village in which there were several strange temples to strange gods. The foundation of one of these temples had been undermined by rain lasting six days, and was toppling over in the mud At many of the stations we saw American agricultural machinery on freight cars or on station platforms At one station there was a creamery which looked much like a similar establishment in the United States; at most stations, negro boys sold milk to the passengers at a penny a glass The cattle here are queer-looking; they are shorter than ours, and usually have enormous horns. I saw no highly bred cattle, but the native cattle were always fat, and grazing in grass up to their knees. Some of the oxen come from Madagascar, and have great humps on their backs. Oxen are as generally worked on farms here as horses are at