out for a walk in spite of growlings and spittings up above
among the crass-looking clouds. Natal is not a nice country, for women
at all events, to walk in. You have to keep religiously to the road
or track, for woe betide the rash person who ventures on the grass,
though from repeated burnings all about these hills it is quite short.
There is a risk of your treading on a snake, and a certainty of your
treading on a frog. You will soon find your legs covered with small
and pertinacious ticks, who have apparently taken a "header" into your
flesh and made up their minds to die sooner than let go. They must
be the bull-dogs of the insect tribe, these ticks, for a sharp needle
will scarcely dislodge them. At the last extremity of extraction
they only burrow their heads deeper into the skin, and will lose this
important part of their tiny bodies sooner than yield to the gentlest
leverage. Then there are myriads of burs which cling to you in green
and brown scales of roughness, and fringe your petticoats with their
sticky little lumps. As for the poor petticoats themselves, however
short you may kilt them, you bring them back from a walk deeply
flounced with the red clay of the roads; and as the people who wash do
not seem to consider this a disadvantage, and take but little pains to
remove the earth-stains, one's garments gradually acquire, even when
clean, a uniform bordering of dingy red. All the water at this time
of year is red too, as the rivers are stirred up by the heavy summer
rains, and resemble angry muddy ditches more than fresh-water streams.
I miss at every turn the abundance of clear, clean, sparkling water
in the creeks and rivers of my dear New Zealand, and it is only after
heavy rain, when every bath and large vessel has been turned into a
receptacle during the downpour, that one can compass the luxury of
an inviting-looking bath or glass of drinking-water. Of course this
turbid water renders it pretty difficult to get one's clothes properly
washed, and the substitute for a mangle is an active Kafir, who makes
the roughly-dried clothes up into a neat parcel, places them on a
stone and dances up and down upon them for as long or short a time as
he pleases. Fuel is so enormously dear that the cost of having clothes
ironed is something astounding, and altogether washing is one of
the many costly items of Natalian housekeeping. When I remember the
frantic state of indignation and alarm we were all in in England