Gardens of hyacinths and asphodels, And there he built him palaces of song, He sought his dream-love there by many names He trod high chambers lit with ruby light, He knew the demon whispers in the deep, And songs of deathless love where seraphs are; IV O POET, not for you the trampling street, Into the dim and old. O poet, life was bitter to your heart: These stones have memories of the tears you shed: Forgive the serpent tongue, the flying dartForgive us from the dead. You sang your song; we gave you scorn for pay; For beauty's bread we gave a stone, and yet Because our eyes were holden on the way, Remember to forget. Sing, Israfel: you have your star at last, Your morning star; but we we still must live! A JOURNEY THROUGH CENTRAL AFRICA* T. A. RICKARD Our party consisted of three, James S. Douglas, George Kingdon, and myself, all mining engineers. My two friends live in Arizona, and are connected prominently with coppermining operations on a large and profitable scale. We met at New York, and sailed on the 'France,' of the French line, on February 28, 1925. Soon after going aboard I renewed acquaintance with a French engineer, Captain Altmayer, who introduced us to three of his fellow-countrymen, so that our party found itself soon in the thick of international politics, with particular reference to postwar conditions. Tot homines, quot sententiae. Our French companions complained that England was too gentle to our late enemy, Germany; they said that this gentleness sprang from the desire to promote trade; they asserted that England forgave her enemies and forgot her friends; they talked of war and rumors of war as many of us talk of golf! Altmayer insisted that the partition of Germany into north and south, Protestant and Romanist, would have prevented Germany from doing further harm, particularly to France, and that Germany escaped proper punishment by reason of the influence exerted by the money-changers, la haute Juiverie internationale. To us Americans these Frenchmen said: "We had an unequal fight with Germany; you came to help us; then you let us down; why save us only to let us perish later?" The funding of the British debt to the United States, they * A paper read before the Berkeley Club, University of California, on August 28, 1925. considered as an act of bad faith to the other allies; and, so complaining, they passed to the sinister suggestion that there were persons in France who advocated an alliance with Germany, to establish economic solidarity, and thereby to defeat the designs of perfidious Albion! Comment is superfluous. One is reminded of the blunder, to put it mildly, made by the English and French in the Near East, when one power assisted the Greeks and the other our late enemy the Turks, with results completely stultifying to the previous allied policy as expressed by the Treaty of Lausanne. Have governments no conscience? On arrival in London, I heard the English side of the controversy. The French, I was told, are too temperamental and individualistic as a nation, they can see only one side of a case, namely, their own, and they are too unwilling to compromise. They are inclined to shout rather than listen; therefore they are slow to help in restoring Europe to economic health. My first impression of London was of a people serious and sad; their clothes seemed dull and shabby; old men were too numerous, and too many were the crippled soldiers that disguised their beggary by selling matches or pencils on the street. I went to a revue at the Duke of York theater; in the course of the play the chief actor said that "there was a time when England could laugh; now there is nothing to laugh about." The remark evoked applause. The next morning the manager of the hotel (a woman) asked me how I liked the revue, and when I mentioned the undertone of sadness she told me that there had been five men in her family, of whom four had fallen in the War, leaving only her aged father. Her plight was not so exceptional as it seems to us. We escaped the need for the greater sacrifice. The British have lost a good deal, but they retain their adverbs. "Caution, Drive Slowly," I read. In the United States the adjective 'slow' would suffice. Nor have the British lost the habit of saying "Thank you' when occasion arises. Small tips are acknowledged pleasantly, and one does not feel it an exaction to recognize courteous service. On March 13 we sailed from Southhampton for Cape Town. Our ship was the Union-Castle liner, the 'Saxon,' on which we made the journey comfortably in 17 days, the distance being 6100 miles. It was pleasant to escape from the cold east winds of London into the balmy air of summer seas. The romance of wireless telegraphy was brought home to us when one of our party exchanged greetings with his wife, who was entering the Mediterranean on a steamer from New York at the time when her husband was approaching the island of Madeira. This is a Portuguese possession. Next day we passed the Cape Verde Islands, which belong to Spain. The ship's company was mostly British, either insular or overseas, and the affairs of South Africa were discussed as much as those of Europe. My first glimpse of South Africa was in the early dawn, when the lights of Cape Town were being extinguished and the sunrise was bathing the battlemented cliffs of Table Mountain. This famous landmark has a tabular top, caused by the nearly horizontal stratification of beds of sandstone and quartzite, resting upon the basal granite. The town and the harbor lie at the foot of the mountain, together composing a picture that is worthy of the story in which they play so large a part. Upon disembarking at the dock the first note of strangeness was struck by the black and brown skins of the porters and stevedores. The colored population of Cape Town is 125,000, as against 90,000 whites. Every shade of miscegenation is to be seen. The Union of South Africa consists of four provinces, the Cape, Natal, the Transvaal, and the Orange Free State, the aggregate area being 473,000 square miles. The total population is 7,000,000, of which 5,000,000 are of native, that is, negroid, race. In Natal the natives keep themselves apart from the whites; in the Transvaal miscegenation is forbidden by law, but in the Cape Colony there is no restriction, and the result is lamentable. On landing I saw a sign: 'No Smoking,' and underneath 'Niet Roken.' We were in a bilingual country. Cape Town is Kaapstad. Every public notice is printed in two langu ages, English and Afrikaans. The latter is also known as the Taal; it is the speech of the Boers and is a dialect of Dutch, French, English, and Kaffir derivations. The old Dutch, or High Dutch, language is known to few. According to law, the proceedings of Parliament must be recorded both in English and High Dutch, the literary language of Holland, from which came the founders of the Cape Colony, in 1652. Six years later the first Negro slaves from the West Coast were landed, as well as slaves from the Dutch East Indies, Java, and Malacca, these last being known as Malays, and contributing further to the cloaca gentium. The English dispossessed the Dutch in 1814, and in 1833 the emancipation of the slaves released 39,000 of them in the Cape Colony. This act of the British Government, and the manner in which it was done, so irritated the old Dutch settlers that many of them went forth in their covered. wagons into the wilderness, where they founded new settlements along the Orange River and across the Vaal, these becoming in due course the republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The English prohibited the use of Dutch in the courts, thereby causing further annoyance to the Boers, a name by which the Dutch, and French, farmers and herdsmen became known. The antagonism between the Dutch and English has survived to this day, despite the healing effect of loyal coöperation in the war against Germany, and despite the obvious need for similar coöperation in facing the insistent problem of exercising control over the overwhelming majority of negroid people. While at Cape Town I went to the House of Assembly, to listen to a parliamentary debate. At the start of the day's session the Speaker recites a prayer; one day it is spoken in English; the next in High Dutch. Every motion, when put to the House by the Speaker is stated first in one language, then in the other. As I listened to the debate I discovered that four languages or dialects were being spoken: High Dutch, Low Dutch or Afrikaans, literary English, and illiterate English. The government of the Union just now is in the combined hands of the Boer and Labor parties, |