The following morning, he said, his best friend would not have known him, so swollen and distorted was his face from the visitations of the inseparable little companions of the Kaffir native.  He was liberated on bail next day, and finally set free, with a scanty apology of mistaken identity.  At any other time such an insult to an Englishman would have made some stir; as it was, everyone was so harassed that he was hardly pitied.

The Governor returned two days before our departure, and we had a gay time, between entertainments for the cricketers and festivities given by the 7th Hussars.  Feeling in Durban, with regard to the Raiders, was then running high, and for hours did a vast crowd wait at the station merely in order to give the troopers of the Chartered Forces some hearty cheers, albeit they passed at midnight in special trains without stopping.  Very loyal, too, were these colonists, and no German would have had a pleasant time of it there just then, with the Kaiser’s famous telegram to Kruger fresh in everyone’s memory.

From Pietermaritzburg to Johannesburg the railway journey was a very interesting one.  North of Newcastle we saw a station bearing the name of Ingogo; later on the train wound round the base of Majuba Hill, and when that was felt behind it plunged into a long rocky tunnel which pierces the grassy slope on which the tragedy of Laing’s Nek was enacted—­all names, alas! too well known in the annals of our disasters.  After leaving the Majuba district, we came to the Transvaal frontier, where we had been told we might meet with scanty courtesy.  However, we had no disagreeable experiences, and then the train emerged on the endless rolling green plains which extend right up to and beyond the mining district of the Rand.

Now and then one perceived a trek waggon and oxen with a Boer and his family, either preceded or followed by a herd of cattle, winding their slow way along the dusty red track they call road.  At the stations wild-looking Kaffir women, half naked and anything but attractive in appearance, came and stared at the train and its passengers.  It is in this desolate country that Johannesburg, the Golden City, sprang up, as it were, like a fungus, almost in a night.  Nine years previously the Rand—­since the theatre of so much excitement and disappointment—­the source of a great part of the wealth of London at the present day, was as innocent of buildings and as peaceful in appearance as those lonely plains over which we had travelled.  As we approached Johannesburg, little white landmarks like milestones made their appearance, and these, we were told, were new claims pegged out.  The thought suggested itself that this part of South Africa is in some respects a wicked country, with, it would almost seem, a blight resting on it:  sickness, to both man and beast, is always stalking round; drought is a constant scourge to agriculture; the locust plagues ruin those crops and fruit that hailstones and scarcity of water have spared; and all the while men vie with and tread upon one another in their rush and eagerness after the gold which the land keeps hidden.  Small wonder this district has proved such a whirlpool of evil influences, where everyone is always striving for himself, and where disillusions and bitter experiences have caused each man to distrust his neighbour.