CHAPTER XXVI

In South Africa

MAY 4, 1896. On the drive to the Trappist Monastery,
splendid spot of fire glowing at intervals a foot above the
grass. It was a flower,—a flower the size of a child's fist,
uplifted on a very slender stem. It suggested "torch." It
was difficult to see how it could suggest anything else—
unless perhaps "lamp." Inquiring, was told it is called the
"lantern" flower. It is wrong. Lanterns are not perched on
top of poles, but torches are, and street lamps.

Banana fields and pineapple. A grass-thatched hut
peeping from a wilderness of broad banana leaves is just
right Any other kind of house does not harmonize. All
through the two-hour drive, over the hills there were
pleasant surprises. I could frame glimpses, with my hands,
of rocks and grassy slopes and distant groups of trees
that were exactly American—New England, New York,
Iowa—remove the hands and let groups of tropic things-
spiky plants, plants like bunches of vegetable swords,
plumy tall palms, the cactus tree, the flat-roof tree, and
so on—the illusion was gone. Again the road would be like
a prairie road—sandy, deep rutted, the grassy expanses
like their like in the prairie; couples and groups of negro
men and women strolling along, dressed exactly like our
darkies and with exactly the same, faces—and I could
imagine myself in Texas; then suddenly a gang of un-
modified Zulus would appear, festooned with glass beads
and with necklaces made of the vertebrse of snakes, the
men's hair wrought into a myriad of little wormy forms,

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