Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Part 7Twain, Mark
General
Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Part 7
Twain, Mark
Equator -- Description and travel; Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 -- Travel; Voyages around the world
The reduction of the population by Rhodesian methods to the desired limit
is a return to the old-time slow-misery and lingering-death system of a
discredited time and a crude "civilization." We humanely reduce an
overplus of dogs by swift chloroform; the Boer humanely reduced an
overplus of blacks by swift suffocation; the nameless but right-hearted
Australian pioneer humanely reduced his overplus of aboriginal neighbors
by a sweetened swift death concealed in a poisoned pudding. All these
are admirable, and worthy of praise; you and I would rather suffer either
of these deaths thirty times over in thirty successive days than linger
out one of the Rhodesian twenty-year deaths, with its daily burden of
insult, humiliation, and forced labor for a man whose entire race the
victim hates. Rhodesia is a happy name for that land of piracy and
pillage, and puts the right stain upon it.
Several long journeys--gave us experience of the Cape Colony railways;
easy-riding, fine cars; all the conveniences; thorough cleanliness;
comfortable beds furnished for the night trains. It was in the first
days of June, and winter; the daytime was pleasant, the nighttime nice
and cold. Spinning along all day in the cars it was ecstasy to breathe
the bracing air and gaze out over the vast brown solitudes of the velvet
plains, soft and lovely near by, still softer and lovelier further away,
softest and loveliest of all in the remote distances, where dim
island-hills seemed afloat, as in a sea--a sea made of dream-stuff and
flushed with colors faint and rich; and dear me, the depth of the sky,
and the beauty of the strange new cloud-forms, and the glory of the
sunshine, the lavishness, the wastefulness of it! The vigor and
freshness and inspiration of the air and the sunwell, it was all
just as Olive Schreiner had made it in her books.
To me the veldt, in its sober winter garb, was surpassingly beautiful.
There were unlevel stretches where it was rolling and swelling, and
rising and subsiding, and sweeping superbly on and on, and still on and
on like an ocean, toward the faraway horizon, its pale brown deepening by
delicately graduated shades to rich orange, and finally to purple and
crimson where it washed against the wooded hills and naked red crags at
the base of the sky.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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