A Breath from the Veldt 165 



water, with the salt waves splashing over them ! I did not know this before, 

 and may perhaps be excused if I continue to doubt the fact, even though 

 backed by the authority of the natives up the Congo on the west coast of 

 Africa, who entertain pretty nearly the same ideas as to the home and habits 

 of the British race. The belief may possibly have originated with cannibal 

 races of days gone by ; for, apart from the superstitious dread with which the 

 natives regard the white man, few of them care to kill him for food, his flesh 

 being, it is said, so impregnated with salt as to be almost uneatable. Cannibals 

 much prefer their own kind, as related in Romilly's Pacific, and that most interest- 

 ing of all books on native life. In Savage Africa, by Captain Winwood Reade. 



The Shangans believe that they themselves originated from a common 

 mother, who sprang from the reeds by some river, and that death is the end 

 of all things ; there is nothing whatever beyond the grave. Office thinks, 

 moreover, that the English come to Africa to get " biltung " and then go home 

 and buy wives ; while Pompoom affirms that they come over to keep dry, as 

 in England it is always raining. They are certainly " dry " enough, in one 

 sense of the word, when they get there. In fact, I never saw so many thirsty 

 Englishmen in all my life as in Johannesburg, where every second man who " has 

 a few minutes to spare " seems to be afflicted with the hand-to-mouth disease. 



Two hysenas come every evening to make night hideous, sleep fitful, and 

 dogs excited. Teenie tried to poison them with strychnine, but I am inclined 

 to think that the drug agrees with them, for they have already disposed of four 

 doctored pieces of meat, without any apparent result. No one can imagine 

 the profound and weird melancholy of the spotted hyena's howl. Tom Hood 

 might have added to his inimitable verses of the " Haunted House " order, had 

 he ever heard the sound on a dark African night ; and no picture of the brute 

 when emitting it— not even the powerful black-and-white light effects of a 

 Gustave Dore — could convey to the reader the " Hark to the Tomb " effect 

 on eye and brain that the sound of their voices creates. 



The last night of our stay at Gong I went to bed early and tired, after 

 five hard days in pursuit of roan antelopes, without any result. About ten 

 o'clock one of the hyasnas returned and began one of his awful howls within 

 (I should guess) forty yards of the waggon. He had taken the poisoned bait, 

 and never in my life have I heard anything more human and heart-rending 

 than the cries he emitted some two or three minutes afterwards. Personally I 

 did not much care for this barbarous method of killing animals ; but really 

 dangerous and offensive brutes like lions, leopards, and hyaenas have, I suppose. 



