Читать книгу Home Life on an Ostrich Farm - Annie Mrs. Martin - Страница 7

Table of Contents

We move up-country — Situation of farm — Strange vegetation of Karroo district — Karroo plant — Fei-bosch — Brack-bosch — Our flowers — Spekboom — Bitter aloes — Thorny plants — Wacht-een-Beetje — Ostriches killed by prickly pear — Finger-poll — Wild tobacco fatal to ostriches — Carelessness of colonists — Euphorbias — Candle-bush.

Our five months at Walmer passed so pleasantly, that in spite of my longing to be settled on a place of our own, and the impatience I felt to enter on all the duties and pleasures of farm life among the ostriches, I was really sorry when the time of departure came, and in the beginning of winter—i.e. towards the latter part of May—we left the little house, the first home of our married life, and took our journey up-country. We had no very long distance to travel, for the farm in the Karroo district which T—— had chosen was only a day's journey from "The Bay," as Port Elizabeth, like San Francisco, is familiarly called; and instead of being, like many proprietors of farms, quite out of the world, and obliged to drive for two or even three days to reach the railway, we had our choice of two stations; the nearest, Klipplaat, being only fifteen miles from us, and the railway journey not more than eight hours.

Our farm, extending over twelve thousand acres, was situated in a long valley running between two ranges of mountains, the steepness of which rendered enclosing unnecessary in many parts; thus saving much expense in starting the farm, an entirely new one, and chosen purposely by T—— on this account. For it sometimes happens that land on which ostriches have run for years becomes at last unhealthy for the birds. We were in that part of the Karroo which is called the Zwart Ruggens, or "black rugged country;" so named from the appearance it presents when, during the frequent long droughts, the bush loses all its verdure, and becomes outwardly so black and dry-looking that no one unacquainted with this most curious kind of vegetation would suppose it capable of containing the smallest amount of nutriment for ostriches, sheep, or goats. But if you break one of these apparently dried-up sticks, you find it all green and succulent inside, full of a very nourishing saline juice; and thus, even in long droughts which sometimes last more than a year, this country is able to support stock in a most marvellous manner, of which, judging by outward appearance, it certainly does not seem capable. It seems strange that in this land of dryness the plants are so full of moisture; one wonders whence it can possibly have come.

The little karroo plant, from which the district takes its name, is one of the best kinds of bush for ostriches, as well as for sheep and goats; it grows in little compact round tufts not more than seven or eight inches from the ground, and though so valuable to farmers, it is but unpretending in appearance, with tiny, narrow leaves, and a little, round, bright yellow flower, exactly resembling the centre of an English daisy after its oracle has been consulted, and its last petal pulled by some enquiring Marguérite.

The fei-bosch is another of our commonest and most useful plants; its pinkish-lilac flower is very like that of the portulacca, and its little flat succulent leaves look like miniature prickly pear leaves without the prickles; hence its name, from Turk-fei, Turkish fig. When flowering in large masses, and seen at a little distance, the fei-bosch might almost be taken for heather.

The brack-bosch, which completes our trio of very best kinds of ostrich-bush, is a taller and more graceful plant than either of the preceding, with blue-green leaves, and blossom consisting of a spike of little greenish tufts; but there are an endless variety of other plants, among which there is hardly one that is not good nourishing food for the birds.

A. Martin, Del.

Some of the Best Kinds of Ostrich-Bush.

1. Brack-bosch. 2. Ghanna. 3. Fei-bosch.

All are alike succulent and full of salt, giving out a crisp, crackling sound as you walk over them; all have the same strange way of growing, each plant a little isolated patch by itself, just as the tufts of wool grow on the Hottentots' heads; and the flowers of nearly all are of the portulacca type, some large, some small, some growing singly, others in clusters; they are of different colours—white, yellow, orange, red, pink, lilac, etc. They are very delicate and fragile flowers; and, pretty as they are, it is useless to attempt carrying them home, for they close up and fade as soon as they are gathered.

Indeed, nearly all the flowers in that part of the world are unsatisfactory; and those few among them which will keep for a very short time in water are almost useless for table decorations, as they seem incapable of adapting themselves to any sort or form of flower-vase. They are pretty enough in themselves; but the large, thick, stubborn stems, all out of proportion with the flowers, refuse to bend themselves to any graceful form or combination; they all seem starting away from one another in an angular, uncomfortable manner, and of course any pretty arrangement of flowers which will not arrange themselves is impossible. Our thoughts often went back longingly to the flowers of Walmer, compared with which prolific region the Karroo is poverty indeed.

A cineraria, very nearly as large as the cultivated varieties, and of a beautiful deep blue, on which the Dutch have bestowed the euphonious name of blaauw-blometje (little blue flower), several tiny irises, and a rather rare bulb, the hyacinth-like blossoms of which, as well as the upper part of the stalk, are of a lovely tint between scarlet and deep rose-colour, and all soft and velvety in texture, are among our prettiest flowers.

Then there are the mimosa's balls of soft, sweet-scented yellow fringe, perfuming the air all round for a long distance, and making the trees seem all of gold when covered with their masses of bloom. Here and there is a Kaffir bean, a shrub with rather handsome large red flowers, but it is not common. There are a good many colourless, insignificant-looking flowers, and some which are quite uncanny; one, especially, with pendent, succulent bells of livid green and dull red, looks worthy to be one of the ingredients of a witch's cauldron. These are all flowers of the plains; the mountains are richer, but their treasures are only to be attained by making rather long excursions up their steep sides, over the roughest and stoniest of ground, and through a tangled mass of vegetation, most of which is very thorny. But even the weariest climb is well repaid on reaching the heights where the wild geraniums grow. The immense round bushes, five or six feet in diameter, and brilliant with great bunches of pink or scarlet flowers, are indeed a lovely sight. A creeping ivy-leaved geranium, and a very pretty pelargonium, which is also a creeper, grow in these same far-off regions; the flower of the latter is of a beautiful rich maroon and cream-colour, its curiously jointed stem and tiny leaves are very succulent, salt to the taste, and strongly scented with the sweet geranium perfume. It is strange to notice how plants which in Europe are neither saline nor particularly succulent, when growing in the Karroo assume the prevailing character of its vegetation.

Large white marguérites, growing on a shrub with a hard, woody stem, inhabit the same heights as the geraniums and pelargoniums; all these together would have been invaluable for the brightening of our little rooms, if we could possibly have brought them home. But they are all much too delicate to survive the long walk or ride back, and the only mountain flowers we could reasonably hope to bring home in a presentable condition were the large, bright yellow immortelles. The scanty little streams trickling down some of the cool shady kloofs between the mountains are the home of a few white arums; and their rocky beds are fringed, though not very abundantly, with maidenhair fern.

The spekboom, which is a good-sized shrub, sometimes attaining the height of fifteen or twenty feet, grows plentifully a little way up the mountains; and in very protracted droughts, when the karroo and other bush of the plains begin at last to fail, it is our great resource for the ostriches, which then ascend for the purpose of feeding on it; and though they do not care for it as they do for their usual kinds of food, it is good and nourishing for them. Elephants are very fond of the spekboom, but though a few of these animals are still found near Port Elizabeth, there are fortunately none in our neighbourhood to make inroads on the supplies reserved for the ostriches against what certainly in South Africa cannot be called "a rainy day." The spekboom has a large soft stem, very thick, round, succulent leaves, and its clusters of star-shaped, wax-like flowers are white, sometimes slightly tinged with pink. There are several plants very closely resembling the spekboom; one with pretty, bright yellow flowers; and one, the soft stem of which, if cut into thin slices, looks exactly like very red salt tongue.

Those unpleasant old acquaintances of childish days, the bitter aloes, are at home in the Karroo in great numbers; and most brilliantly do they light up the somewhat gloomy-looking sides of the mountains in early spring with the great spikes of their shaded scarlet and orange-coloured flowers, looking like gigantic "red-hot poker plants." This African aloe has none of the slender grace of its American relative, and it is only when flowering that it has any claim to beauty; at all other times it is simply a most untidy-looking plant, the thick, clumsy stem for about five or six feet below the crown of leaves being covered with the ragged, decaying remains of former vegetation, suggestive of numberless scorpions and centipedes.

Thorny plants abound, especially on the mountains, where indeed almost every bush which is not soft and succulent is armed with strong, sharp, often cruelly hooked spikes. The wacht-een-beetje (wait-a-bit) does not grow in our neighbourhood, but we have several plants which seem to me no less deserving of the name; and often, when held a prisoner on some ingenious arrangement of hooks and spikes viciously pointing in every possible direction, each effort to free myself involving me more deeply, and inflicting fresh damage on clothes and flesh, I should, but for T——'s assurance to the contrary, have quite believed I had encountered it. The constant repairing of frightful "trap-doors" and yawning rents of all shapes and sizes in T——'s garments and in my own, took up a large proportion of time; and often did I congratulate myself on the fact that my riding-habit at least—chosen contrary to the advice of friends at home, who all counselled coolness and lightness above everything—was of such stout, strong cloth as to defy most of the thorns. Any less substantial material would have been reduced to ribbons in some of our rides.

On foot, you are perpetually assailed by the great strong hooks of the wild asparagus, a troublesome enemy, whose long straggling branches trailing over the ground are most destructive to the skirts of dresses; while boots have deadly foes, not only in the shape of rough ground and hard, sharp-pointed stones, but also in that of numerous prickly and scratchy kinds of small bush. At the end of one walk in the veldt, the surface of a kid boot is all rubbed and torn into little ragged points, and is never again fit to be seen. Fortunately, in the Karroo, no one is over-particular about such small details.

Among our troublesome plants, one of the worst and most plentiful is the prickly pear; and farmers have indeed no reason to bless the old Dutchwoman who, by simply bringing one leaf of it from Cape Town to Graaff-Reinet, was the first introducer of what has become so great a nuisance. It spreads with astonishing rapidity, and is so tenacious of life that a leaf, or even a small portion of a leaf, if thrown on the ground, strikes out roots almost immediately, and becomes the parent of a fast-growing plant; and it is not without great trouble and expense that farms can be kept comparatively free from it. Sometimes a little party of Kaffirs would be encamped on some part of our land especially overgrown with prickly pears; and there for months together they would be at work, cutting in pieces and rooting out the intruders; piling the disjointed stems and leaves in neatly-arranged stacks, where they would soon ferment and decay. Labour being dear in the colony, the wages of "prickly-pear-men" form a large item in the expenditure of a farm; in many places indeed, where the plants are very numerous, it does not pay to clear the land, which consequently becomes useless, many farms being thus ruined.

Sometimes ostriches, with that equal disregard of their own health and of their possessor's pocket for which they are famous, help themselves to prickly pears, acquire a morbid taste for them, and go on indulging in them, reckless of the long, stiff spikes on the leaves, with which their poor heads and necks soon become so covered as to look like pin-cushions stuck full of pins; and of the still more cruel, almost invisible fruit-thorns which at last line the interior of their throats, besides so injuring their eyes that they become perfectly blind, and are unable to feed themselves.

Many a time has a poor unhappy ostrich, the victim of prickly pear, been brought to me in a helpless, half-dead state, to be nursed and fed at the house. Undaunted by previous experience, I perseveringly tended each case, hoping it might prove the exception to the general rule, but never were my care and devotion rewarded by the recovery of my patient. There it would squat for a few days, the picture of misery; its long neck lying along the ground in a limp, despondent manner, suggestive of the attitudes of seasick geese and ducks on the first day of a voyage. Two or three times a day I would feed it, forcing its unwilling bill open with one hand, while with the other I posted large handfuls of porridge, mealies, or chopped prickly pear leaves in the depths of its capacious letter-box of a throat. All to no purpose; it had made up its mind to die, as every ostrich does immediately illness or accident befalls it, and most resolutely did it carry out its intention.

The prickly pear, mischievous though it is, is not altogether without its good qualities. Its juicy fruit, though rather deficient in flavour, is delightfully cool and refreshing in the dry heat of summer; and a kind of treacle, by no means to be despised at those not infrequent times when butter is either ruinous in price or quite unattainable, is made from it. A strong, coarse spirit, equal to the aguardiente of Cuba in horrible taste and smell, is distilled from prickly pears; and though to us it seemed only fit to be burned in a spirit-lamp, when nothing better could be procured, it is nectar to the Boers and Hottentots, who drink large quantities of it. Great caution is needed in peeling the prickly pear, the proper way being to impale the fruit on a fork or stick while you cut it open and remove the skin. On no account must the latter be touched with the hands, or direful consequences will ensue. To the inexperienced eye the prickly pear looks innocent enough; with its smooth, shiny skin, suggestive only of a juicy interior, and telling no tale of lurking mischief—yet each of those soft-looking little tufts, with which at regular intervals it is dotted, is a quiver filled with terrible, tiny, hairlike thorns, or rather stings; and woe betide the fingers of the unwary "new chum," who, with no kind friend at hand to warn him, plucks the treacherous fruit. He will carry a lively memento of it for many days.

My first sad experience of prickly pears was gained, not in South, but in North Africa. Landing with a friend in Algiers some time ago, our first walk led us to the fruit market, where, before a tempting pile of figues de Barbarie, we stopped to quench the thirst of our thirty-six hours' passage. The fruit was handed to us, politely peeled by the Arab dealer; and thus, as we made our first acquaintance with its delightful coolness, no suspicion of its evil qualities entered our minds. And when, a few days later, adding the excitement of a little trespassing to the more legitimate pleasures of a country ramble, we came upon a well-laden group of prickly pear bushes, we could not resist the temptation to help ourselves to some of the fruit—and woeful was the result. Concentrated essence of stinging-nettle seemed all at once to be assailing hands, lips, and tongue; and our skin, wherever it had come in contact with the ill-natured fruit, was covered with a thick crop of minute, bristly hairs, apparently growing from it, and venomous and irritating to the last degree. Our silk gloves, transformed suddenly into miniature robes of Nessus, had to be thrown away, perfectly unwearable; and the inadvertent use of our pocket-handkerchiefs, before we had fully realized the extent of our misfortune, caused fresh agonies, in which nose as well as lips participated. For many a day did the retribution of that theft haunt us in the form of myriads of tiny stings. It was a long time indeed before we were finally rid of the last of them; and we registered a vow that whatever Algerian fruit we might dishonestly acquire in future, it should not be figues de Barbarie.

In dry weather at the Cape these spiteful little stings do not even wait for the newly-arrived victim; but fly about, light as thistle-down, ready to settle on any one who has not learned by experience to give the prickly pear bushes a wide berth.

The leaves of the prickly pear are good for ostriches and cattle, though the work of burning off the thorns and cutting the leaves in pieces is so tedious that it is only resorted to when other food becomes scarce. One kind, the kahlblad, or "bald leaf," has no thorns. It is comparatively rare, and farmers plant and cultivate it as carefully as they exterminate its troublesome relative.

Another kind of cactus, which, if the beautiful forms in Nature were utilized for artistic purposes half as much as they deserve to be, would long since have been recognized as a most perfect model for a graceful branched candlestick, is used as food for cattle during long droughts, being burnt and cut up in the same manner as the prickly pear. When the plant is in flower, each branch of the candlestick seems tipped with a bright yellow flame.

Another of our many eccentric-looking plants, the finger-poll, is also used in very dry seasons to feed cattle; the men who go about the country cutting it up being followed by the animals, which are very fond of it, but which, owing to its excessive toughness, are unable to bite it off. It grows close to the ground; its perfect circle of thick, short fingers, rather like gigantic asparagus, radiating stiffly from the centre. How the cattle manage to eat it without serious consequences has always been a matter of wonder to me, for the whole plant is filled with a thick, white, milky juice, which when dry becomes like the strongest india-rubber. We often used this juice for mending china, articles of jewellery, and many things which defied coaguline, to which, indeed, we found it superior.

One of our plants always reminded me of those French sweets, threaded on a stiff straw, which often form a part of the contents of a bon-bon box. The thick, succulent leaves, shaded green and red, with a frosted, sparkling surface which increases the resemblance to the candied sweets, and all as exactly alike in shape and size as if made in one mould, are threaded like beads at equal distances along the stem, which passes through a little round hole in the very centre of each. They can all be taken off and threaded on again just as they were before.

Close to the ground, and growing from a little round root apparently belonging to the bulbous tribe, you sometimes—though only rarely—see a tiny mass of soft, curling fibres, delicate and unsubstantial-looking as a little green cloud. Even the foliage of asparagus would look coarse and heavy if placed beside this really ethereal little plant, which yet is durable, for I have now with me a specimen which, though gathered five years ago, is still quite unchanged.

The wild tobacco is a common—indeed too common—plant in the Karroo; it has clusters of long, narrow, trumpet-shaped flowers, of a light yellow, its leaves are small, and it resembles the cultivated tobacco neither in appearance nor in usefulness. Indeed it is one of our worst enemies, being poisonous to ostriches, which of course—true to their character—lose no opportunity of eating it. We made deadly war upon it, and whenever during our rides about the farm we came upon a clump of its blue-green bushes, we would make up a little bonfire at the foot of each, and burn it down to the ground. But it is tenacious of life, and its roots go down deep, so its career of evil was only cut short for a time. Besides which, our efforts to keep it under were of little avail while our neighbours, "letting things slide," in true colonial fashion, allowed the plants to run wild on their own land; from whence the seeds were always liable to be washed down to us during "a big rain," when the deep sluits which everywhere intersect the country become, in a few hours, raging torrents, dashing along at express speed.

Strangely enough, when T——, some years ago, was travelling in Australia, to which country he had brought some ostriches from the Cape, he found that wild tobacco grew nowhere throughout the length and breadth of the land, excepting just in the very region in which the birds had been established. During that trip he also found that the "salt-bush" of Australia, which is there considered the best kind of food for sheep, is almost identical with the brack-bosch of the Cape Colony, the only difference being that it grows higher. We have also seen the same bush growing in Algeria, and near Marseilles.

On the lower slopes of some of our mountains grow tall euphorbias, shooting up straight and stiff as if made of metal, and branching out in the exact form of the Jewish candlestick sculptured on the arch of Titus in Rome. Some of these euphorbias attain the height of forty feet—quite important dimensions in that comparatively treeless land. They impart an air of melancholy and desolation to the landscape; and look particularly weird and uncanny when, on a homeward ride, you pass through a grove of them at dusk.

One more queer plant in conclusion of these slight and very unscientific reminiscences of our flora, which I trust may never meet the eye of any botanist. The kerzbosch, or candle-bush, a stunted, thorny plant, if lighted at one end when in the green state, will burn steadily just like a wax candle, and is used as a torch for burning off the thorns of prickly pear, etc.