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islanders, although their language is quite different from that of those people, and they have no hand-loom, which is common in the Caroline Islands. Pleasant Island presents one of the most difficult ethnological puzzles in the Pacific, and in this respect it resembles the island of Rotuma. The same wonderfully rich phosphate occurs in enormous quantities, is found in the same condition as that upon Ocean Island, and is exploited by the same Company. Perhaps the most curious fact about the island is the division of the population into twelve tribes, one of which, as I have mentioned, is reserved exclusively for Gilbertines, either themselves drifted away from their homes, or for the descendants of these waifs. This tribe, as among themselves, preserves a speech alien to the island, but of course can also speak the language of Nauru, which is, I repeat, wholly and absolutely distinct from the Gilbertine, and, it is alleged, from any known Pacific dialect.

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VOL. CLXXXVIII.—NO. MCXLI.

A HOLIDAY IN SOUTH AFRICA.

BY THE RIGHT HON. SIR H. MORTIMER DURAND, G.C.M.G., K.C.S.I., K.C.I.E.

I.

THE VOYAGE.

IT is always saddening to say good-bye to one's home, but there is something pleasant in passing from the cold and darkness of our English autumn to sudden warmth and sunshine. Southampton looked very wet and dreary on the Saturday afternoon as the great white ship slowly worked herself away from the jetty. On the Monday she was gliding over a blue summer sea, with hardly a ripple. On the Wednesday morning we were sitting at breakfast in the soft air of Madeira, among the tree-ferns and the sugar - canes, looking down the wooded hillside to the sun-bathed harbour, where she swung at her moorings, a little white toy. And when we had sledded down the cobble road and got on board, and she began to move again, the wave that fell away from her side was blue, all blue, every shade of blue, from turquoise to the deepest sapphire.

How things have changed since Queen Victoria was a child. South Africa, or rather Cape Colony, was then nothing more than the half-way house to India, and was ruled as such by English governors, acting under instructions carried by sailing ships over six thousand miles of sea.

In one of those sailing ships, the Lady Holland, my father, going out to India as a young lieutenant of Engineers, made the voyage to Cape Town in 1829. The night that the Lady Holland dropped anchor in Funchal harbour the Company's Agent was giving a ball, and almost all the officers on board ship's officers as well as soldiers-went on shore to attend it. Then a sudden storm came on, and the ship had to put out to sea; and for a fortnight she was beating about in heavy weather, very short-handed, unable to approach the island. When at last she did make Funchal again and picked up her officers, she had to sail most of the way to the Cape under the protection of a frigate, for fear of pirates. Then one fine night, nearly four months after leaving England, as she was going along under full sail, expecting to anchor next day under the shadow of Table Mountain, there was a sudden cry of "Breakers ahead," and a moment later she struck with a crash. There was just time to get out the boats before she sank, and the poor ladies who came running up on deck were landed in their night-dresses, supplemented by the pea-jackets

of the sailors, on the lonely shore of Dassan Island. There they remained for some days, living on penguin's eggs. When they were taken off and brought to Cape Town, having lost everything they possessed, they had to wait six weeks and pay something like three hundred pounds apiece for a passage to India, and the sailing ship that took them was wrecked, happily without loss of life, at the mouth of the Hoogly.

Some wrecks, alas! there will always be so long as men go down to the sea in ships, but things have certainly changed since those times, and not altogether for the worse. Now we have only to endure sixteen days in a mighty steamship, defiant of winds and waves, and blazing with electric light, as steady as a church, and as luxurious as a London hotel; and some of us are inclined to grumble because the passage takes so long, or because the steward does not bring us with our morning tea, as he does on the Cunard boats, a daily paper full of news received during the night by wireless telegram. Long may we be spared. Is a man to have no peace even in the South Atlantic? We had no wireless apparatus on board, so we spent a fortnight of

unalloyed happiness in those lonely seas.

We had a few warm days crossing the line, but as we neared the Cape the southerly breeze met us, and it grew cool again.

There were the usual sports, of course. We played cricket daily, one of our best bats being the Bishop of Natal, who several times had to retire with the maximum score of ten. I was made president of the Sports Committee; and as the ladies, instead of being landed on Dassan Island in night-gowns and pea-jackets, insisted upon getting up a fancy-dress ball, I had to undertake the most difficult duty of my life in awarding the prize for the best costume.

The crowded jetty at Cape Town, with its corrugated iron sheds, by the side of which we found ourselves lying one morning in October, is very different from the sketches one remembers, with the beautiful frigates on the curling waters of the bay; but though there is some disenchantment at the first sight of the famous Cape, some sense of loss, there, after all, three thousand feet and more above the roofs of the town, is the long rugged cliff, and the familiar straight line of its summit, and the clear blue sky of South Africa.

II.

CAPE TOWN.

Cape Town, too, has changed in eighty years. It is no longer the mere port of call where

passing ships could get fresh water and vegetables. One finds it difficult now, as one

looks at the well-built streets with their railways and tramways and luxurious shops, to recall from the past the Cape Town of early Victorian days -the little sleepy Dutch town, with its tree-lined canals and its broad-breeched Dutchmen smoking their pipes on the "stoeps,"-almost as difficult as to recall the Cape Town of the seventeenth century, when men avoided going out at night for fear of lions, and the Governor's coach was overturned by a rhinoceros, and the great elephants and river horses wallowed in the neighbouring swamps.

The old star-shaped fort is still there, almost hidden by modern buildings, the railway line passing close by the thick grey walls, but at first sight little else remains to make the old times live again. There is much left in reality if one has leisure and inclination to search for old things. Among the mass of mean modern buildings which have overflowed the suburbs for miles are to be found pine-woods and magnificent avenues of oaks planted by the Dutch settlers, perhaps in the days when England had a Dutch king, and many farms and houses of the Dutch colonial style, and other relics of the past. There is something very pleasing about the Dutch style of architecture. It has some resemblance to the colonial style, in America, but the forms are different. The Dutch houses generally show red roofs with rounded white gables, white walls, and white

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twisted chimneys, the whole effect being very picturesque.

The style is often copied or adapted, sometimes with good results, in modern buildings. A striking example of this is Groote Schuur, the house built by Cecil Rhodes under the eastern crags of Table Mountain, and intended by him as an official residence for the Prime Minister of South Africa in days to come. Cecil Rhodes was successful in this, as in most things, and the house is one of the sights of Cape Town; but I was told on the spot that he broke the hearts of his architects by his manner of building. In his magnificent way he always refused to accept any drawings as final. "All right, run it up," he would say, as some new wing or other addition was suggested; "if I don't like it, we will pull it down and try again." One can imagine that this sort of thing must have been trying, but the result is certainly good,-not a palace, but a very pleasant country house. Round it is a park stocked with African and other animals, and a garden in which there are some fine trees and beautiful flowers. The hydrangea grows well in this climate, and except in one or two spots on the south coast of Cornwall I do not remember seeing anything to match the great masses of blue which are to be found at Groote Schuur and in the neighbouring garden of the Governor at Newlands.

When I was in Cape Town Groote Schuur was the resi

friend, of the South Africans into one nation under the British Crown; and when that nation has firmly established herself among the nations of the world, and her racial animosities are at an end, she as well as England will feel that she owes him much.

dence of Rhodes's Jameson, the Scotch doctor who administered for him the northern territory he had made his own, and broke the power of the fighting Matabele, and rode to Johannesburg on the illstarred raid, and afterwards succeeded his great chief as head of the Progressive party at the Cape. The house is rather shut in under the mountain, but from the back one has a grand view of the precipitous cliffs overhead.

Not far from it, on the hillside, is the Rhodes memorial, a simple flat-topped building of grey granite, in front of which stands Watts's well-known equestrian statue, "Physical Energy," of which the original or a replica is in Kensington Gardens. From this spot there is a fine view over the valley below, rich with fields and vineyards, and of the mountains to the northward, which so long remained the boundary for the old settlers.

Cecil Rhodes lies buried far beyond those mountains, a a thousand miles or more, in the country which his foresight and energy saved for South Africa and the Empire. He had his faults doubtless, as all men have, but as one stands by his monument here at Cape Town and thinks of his far-away grave, a feeling of the size of the man comes over one. He was a great Africander, loving the country of his adoption, but never forgetting the old country from which he drew his blood and his eager spirit. He foresaw and worked for the union

There are many interesting things to be seen at Cape Town: & fine Parliament House; a museum full of the wild beasts of Africa; a botanical garden in which are strange and beautiful flowers; but by far the most striking sight of all is Table Mountain, towering 3500 feet above the blue waters of the Bay. The ascent of the mountain is not difficult. One can ride up, I believe, by a roundabout route; but even if one chooses to climb straight up the face of it, the ascent will trouble no ordinarily good walker. The ground rises from the town itself, but the first mile or so is easy walking on a good path. Then one comes to harder work, where a deep rocky gully, the "Great Kloof," rises to and breaks the line of cliff, a thousand feet high, which tops the mountain. Up this gully two or three rough paths wind through bush and boulder to the summit.

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The day I started to make the ascent a strong south-east wind was blowing. It had been blowing steadily for a week, an unusual thing in Cape Town, making the Bay sparkle with white horses; and roaring through the town; and laying a great mass of

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