Tramp Royale (26 page)

The pastures in South Africa are cluttered with white egrets.

They have the silliest way of behaving of any bird I ever saw (except possibly the Magnificent Bird of Paradise of Australia; we'll get to him later). The egrets stand guard over the cattle, two to each beast, one on each side and facing forward at attention, solemn as sideboys and perfectly motionless. They look as if they had each been assigned to that post by the sergeant of the guard and did not dare stir until relieved.

They are an unbelievable sight when first seen and they are still impressive after one gets used to them-which one does, for there appear to be exactly twice as many tick birds as cattle in South Africa and there are an awful lot of cattle. These tick birds introduced us to a springbok whom I will always cherish.

The springbok is a type of gazelle which is the national symbol of South Africa. Almost everything there is "Springbok"-the national airlines, a chain of theaters, the trademark of the government tourist corporation, their national teams in sports, almost anything you might expect except their Boy Scouts who are "Voortrekkers" instead. Springboks used to be exceedingly numerous; now they are common but not in the great herds they used to exist in. I heard a story about this which sounds incredible but which is told soberly: the springboks are alleged to have committed a lemming-type of mass suicide . . . poured out of the bush in countless numbers, pressed on to the Indian Ocean, waded in, drank sea water, and died.

If this is true, it is at least as hard to explain as any of Dr. Rhine's ESP researches. In any case, springbok are now not so numerous.

Our first springbok came to our attention through watching tick birds. I had kept my eye on them because I could not figure out what they did for a living. Their passion for standing sentry by cattle did not seem to fill the craw; we never saw one stop to eat, not once-yet birds have a very high metabolic rate and
must
eat, early and often.

We had crossed the Orange River into the Orange Free State late that first day and were in green, fenced pastureland rather than open, arid range; cattle were more numerous and so were the egrets. Suddenly Ticky said, "Look!"

A springbok had jumped the fence and was mingling with the cattle, off the road to the right. Sam slowed to a crawl and identified it for us. But this creature had not crashed the party to enjoy the superior salad inside the paddock, oh, no! He was a practical jokester and he was there for the sole purpose of chasing the birds. He would advance in a series of graceful leaps, duck his head and butt an egret; the bird would squawk indignantly and fly away.

He did this again and again. The cattle went right on grazing and the other tick birds each stood fast, staunch as the boy on the burning deck, right up to the horrid but inevitable instant when it was fly or be knocked silly. The springbok cleaned the silly creatures out of that pasture, then jumped the fence again and trotted away, perhaps in search of more tick birds.

We asked Sam if they always behaved that way. He said that it was the first time he had ever seen it in all the years he had been traveling commercially along the highways of the country. We concluded that this our favorite springbok was a deviant, as exceptional and as touched with genius among his sort as was Mark Twain or Thorne Smith among us.

The Southern end of the Karoo is very dry and is sheep country. A little farther north the range improves and is cattle country. With the cattle come the tick birds and, as the country gets greener, more wading birds, storks, cranes, secretary birds, and others. There were ostriches, too, but I believe that all we saw of these were domesticated. Much of the land is ruined for farming by termites; their hills are often so thickly clustered as to turn otherwise level ground into badlands. The hills come in three types, tall church spires up to a dozen feet high, little mounds the size of a bushel basket or larger, and big mounds which are almost small hills or
koppies.
The dried mud, after having been chewed by the white ants, is a concrete too hard to break with a plow and apparently not soluble in rain. If the Martians ever have to decide who really owns Africa they will probably award it to the termites on adverse possession.

We stopped for tea at Colesberg in Cape Province just short of the Orange River. This town did not have a U.S. southwest appearance but was much like a county seat in Iowa or northern Missouri. From there on through the Orange Free State and across the Vaal River into Transvaal the country was green and lush, like the best of our farm land in the middle of our country. Having traveled more than six hundred and fifty miles we stayed that night at Bloemfontein, capital of the Free State and site of the famous Harvard Observatory. As usual, Sam seemed to know all the girls there; we had stopped several times on the way up to greet his female acquaintances, once right out in the middle of the desert when he spotted a familiar female face back of the wheel of a car coming toward us at a relative speed of a hundred thirty miles per hour. I was gathering the impression that Sam managed to stay a bachelor only by being constantly on the move.

The hotel was delightful and modern in equipment, but old enough to have fine, big rooms and ample baths. In South Africa they do not think a request for a private bath an eccentricity and are prepared to satisfy it. By request, a Bantu knocked on our door at five-thirty with tea for an eye-opener; this is an English custom we would do well to imitate on mornings requiring early starts. It is more effective than a cold shower and much easier to take.

Unfortunately my eyes were not open when the knock came. I forced myself out of a warm bed, grabbed blindly at my robe, and in so doing snatched my glasses off the night table. They hit the floor with a pretty tinkle of broken glass.

I am the sort of person who needs to put on his glasses in order to find his glasses. Being so dependent I am not careless enough to travel with only one pair, but a second pair had been broken the day before during our wild ride around Table Mountain; I was rapidly reaching the point where I would need a little boy to lead me around.

I turned to Ticky, still snug in bed, and said, "Now see what you've done!"

She raised her head and blinked at me. "You spoiled the loveliest dream-I was home. What country is this? And what have I done?"

"Africa. I've just broken my other glasses."

"Poor baby! Poor stupid baby . . . how did it get to be Africa?"

"I don't know. If you had gotten up and answered the door like an ever-loving wife, I wouldn't have busted them."

The polite knock came again. "You're the one with one slipper on and a robe partly on," she pointed out. "You can bring me tea in bed and after breakfast we'll see what can be done about your glasses."

Some women are heartless. I brought her tea in bed, then took a look out into the corridor. Sam's shoes, freshly polished, were outside his door and so was his tea; the night man had been unable to wake him. I kept at it until I woke him, along with everyone else in the corridor, then went back and gulped my tea and felt sorry for myself.

I told Sam about it at breakfast. "Do you suppose we can find a dispensing optician? Our schedule is so confounded tight that I'll have to get them fixed on the fly; the
Ruys
sails for Singapore the very afternoon we reach Durban."

He frowned thoughtfully. "We would have to waste more than two hours here until one opens, when we ought to be chopping a hundred miles off the road to Johannesburg- it's still more than three hundred miles. Just how bad off are you?"

"Not too bad for the moment. I still have an old pair left, with an obsolete prescription I can get by with. But I hate to think of all those weeks to Singapore with the wrong specs. Look, let's find an optician in Johannesburg and I'll have him airmail them to Durban."

"Today is Saturday. I think they'll all close at noon."

"Lordy! Any chance we'll make it by noon?"

"I doubt it. Possible . . . if we all lean forward all the way."

"Then let's lam out of here and get rolling!"

"Finish your coffee and quit worrying about it."

I sighed. "You've got twenty-twenty eyesight. You don't know."

"I said not to worry. I'll get my girl friend to take care of it."

"Huh? Which girl friend? Be more specific."

"The one in Johannesburg."

"Only one in Johannesburg? I thought it was a big city."

"Don't be rude, dear," Ticky advised me. "Sam is trying to help you." She turned to Sam. "He's a beast at this hour, Sam, but useful once the sun is higher."

"I wasn't being rude," I objected. "I just thought Sam made them queue up and show a priority. I admire him. I wish I were like him."

Thereafter the conversation rapidly went to pieces as Ticky tried to make logical her assertion that she thought Sam was wonderful but would break both my arms if I tried to emulate him. We let it rest that Sam would ask his girl friend, serial number one, class Joburg, to have the glasses repaired in time for us to pick them up on our return to the city en route to Durban. I felt very happy over the whole thing; my megrims rarely last past breakfast. I have a sweet disposition and children love me.

During that morning we gradually got into more densely populated country. It was still farm country, but with more cropping and fewer range animals. Wild life almost disappeared except for an occasional meerkat (or "mierkat" or "meercat," take your pick). This little mongooselike critter loves to streak across the road just ahead of cars. Too many of them don't quite make it; we saw their pitiful little bodies oftener than we saw the grey blur that marked where one had just been.

As we got closer to Johannesburg we saw an occasional mine tailing among the farms. The Witwatersrand gold field is the richest gold strike in history-possibly the Incas had something better; if so, it has been lost. It is an underground reef of gold at least sixty miles long and is regularly showing new and unsuspected wealth. Some of the mines are down more than half a mile below sea level, nearly two miles straight down from the 6000-foot plateau on which the Golden City rests. At those awful depths you can put your ear to a rock pillar and hear the stone creak with the incomprehensible weight resting on them.

We arrived in the city proper about one o'clock, too late to find an optician open, but I was no longer worried. We looked up Sam's girl friend, Ida, who was a tall, supple, blonde creature and a professional model, and Ida's sister Laura, who was tall, supple, and brunette and should have been a model but was not, through some oversight. Sam's plan worked out save that it was Laura who took my problem in hand and agreed to see to it that my two pairs of spectacles were repaired. After that they took us out to see the city.

Johannesburg is a seething million people today, where only seventy years ago were only fields of mealies. The town is booming more than ever and buildings are shooting up as in São Paulo. It looks like a mixture of Pasadena and Hollywood, with beautiful gardens, fine parks, and one of the world's most nearly ideal climates, its elevation keeping it from being too hot and its location only a few miles below the Tropic of Capricorn insuring that it is never cold. Its wealthy whites, of which there are many, run to private swimming pools, garden parties, and swank country clubs.

More than half, about six hundred thousand, of the population is non-European, Bantus and a smattering of East Indians. The Hindus are the retail merchants; an "Indian store" is anything from a country general store to a fashionable downtown department store. (We saw a sign in one: "Dogs and bare-footed people are not allowed on the escalator.") The gold industry employs about 300,000 of the blacks, most of whom are contract laborers whose families, if any, have been left back on a reserve and who themselves live in barracks near the mines. Most of the others live in the native locations outside of town. These locations are sometimes shanty towns and are sometimes rows of mass-built little one-room boxes, grim and kennellike.

Some of the native population simply drift on the town, without visible occupation or residence. Their presence there is illegal under the
apartheid
laws and the police and the courts are constantly catching them and imposing sentences which have the effect of forcing them to hire out to the farmers, but they are as elusive as smoke and there are always more to replace those caught. These are natives of what anthropologists speak of despairingly as "fringe" culture, no longer of their ancient culture, not yet part of the new. These drifters have the whites constantly worried. It is not safe to park an automobile in downtown Johannesburg in broad daylight with all doors and windows locked, unless a constant watch is kept on it. The drifters working in pairs, one with a polish rag as camouflage and the other with a tire iron or other jimmying tool, will break into it and loot it, right under the eyes of a crowd of people on the adjacent sidewalk.

At night the streets of Johannesburg are not safe.

We were surprised to see black policemen there. However they are intended only to restrain their own race, they are not armed, and have conditional authority to arrest a white man only under extreme circumstances to prevent immediate violence and then only until a white policeman can be summoned. I never heard of one doing it, even so.

Despite the black cloud of potential racial trouble brooding over it Johannesburg deserves its name of the Golden City. It is young, beautiful, lusty and cheerful. From the many high points in the city you can see that it is surrounded by hills of brown mine tailings, which grow even faster than the constant efforts to plant and garden them. Its white homes are luxuriously beautiful and its downtown district is as modern as any and made exotic by Bantus of both sexes and many tribes in savage splendor only a little modified by white customs-the women cover up a little more but it is not unusual to see a "blanket" man who refuses to wear trousers of any sort and covers up his nakedness with a large blanket. The natives are free to come into the retail area to buy during daylight; curfew must find them out of town, or in the quarters of their white employers.