A native kraal consists of a cluster of huts which exactly resemble huge beehives. There is a rude attempt at sod-fencing round them, and a few head of cattle graze in the neighbourhood. Women roughly scratch the earth with crooked hoes to form a mealy-ground. Cows and mealies are all the Kaffirs require, except blankets and tobacco. The latter is smoked out of a cow’s horn. ‘They seem a very gay and cheerful people,’ says the author, ‘to judge by the laughter and jests I hear from the groups returning to their kraals every day by the road just outside our fence. Sometimes one of the party carries an umbrella; and the effect of a tall Kaffir clad in nothing at all, and carefully guarding his bare head with a tattered “Gamp,” is very ridiculous. Often one of the party walks first, playing upon a rude pipe; whilst the others jig after him, laughing and capering like boys let loose from school, and all chattering loudly.’ No man, except he be a white settler’s servant, ever carries a burden. When an ‘induna’ or chief is ‘on the track,’ he rides a sorry nag, resting only the point of his great toe in the stirrup, like the Abyssinians. He is followed by his ‘tail’ or great men, who carry bundles of sticks and keep up with the ambling steed. Then come the wives, bearing heavy loads on their heads; but walking with firm erect carriage, their shapely arms and legs bare, their bodies, from shoulder to knee, clothed in some coarse stuff, which they drape in exquisite folds. Lady Barker describes the Kaffir women as looking neither oppressed nor discontented, but healthy, happy, jolly, lazy, and slow to appreciate any benefit from civilisation, except the money, concerning which they, in common with most savages, display a keenness of comprehension hardly to be improved upon. A dozen miles from Maritzburg, on the road which forms the first stage of the great overland journey to the Diamond Fields, is the little town of Hawick, on the river Umgeni, which widens down just beneath it to an exquisitely beautiful fall. Over the brink goes the wide, smooth, waveless sheet of water, in an absolutely straight descent of three hundred and twenty feet. From the highest point of the road above the river, the Drakensberg Mountains, snow-covered, except in the hottest summer, are visible, and though majestic, they are disappointing. They are a splendid range of level lines, far up beyond the floating clouds. ‘I miss,’ says the author, ‘the serrated peaks of the Southern Alps and the grand confusion of the Himalayan range. This is evidently the peculiarity of the mountain formation of South Africa; I noticed it first in Table Mountain at Cape Town; it is repeated in every little hill between Durban and Maritzburg, and carried out on a gigantic scale in this splendid range.’