Veldt Marks Its Dwellers

1917

Loneliness and Silence Affect Those Doomed to Live in Plain of British South Africa

Before the Boer war there was a saying current among the Boers of South Africa that you could always recognize a man who had spent five years on the veldt. This was a saying no less true then than now, for the veldt is a place of great silence and loneliness and it leaves its mark on those who dwell in it.

The veldt is the great plain of what is now British South Africa, the limitless, featureless stretch of prairie dotted with knobs of hills that the Boers call kopjes, pierced and gashed by rain-washed gullies that run their twisting coarse from horizon to horizon. The word "veldt" is closely allied to the German word for "world" or "universe," and the relationship is something more than mere coincidence. To the man standing in the midst of this plain it seems to extend in every direction to the outermost limits of space.

The veldt is without sound or color, without striking features to catch the eye. A day's trek among low hills covered with gray grass, plods wearily through mile after mile of the same hills, and ends in a dry valley as like the valley of the morning as one pea is like to another. After a few days of this the traveler wonders if his progress is not a mere illusion, if he is not returning day after day to the same spot.

Now and again the monotony is broken by some veldt farm, a place of exceeding loneliness for the exiles who till it. There will be a farmhouse, a barn, a kraal, a well and a few huts for the kaffirs. To the railroad may be a distance of anywhere from 20 to 70 miles. Half the year the roads are impassable. The little community must be sufficient unto itself. Life on a veldt farm is a severe test of the inner resources of man or woman.