These men are often detached, and
most regiments seem to have one or two of ours with them. Sometimes a
party is detached altogether and acts with another column, and there
are always two or three with the staff. Besides acting as guides they
are interpreters, and handy men generally. All these little subtractions
reduce our main body to about a hundred, or a little less; and this main
body, under Rimington himself, acts as scouts and ordinary fighting men.
In fact, a true description of us would be "a corps of scouts supplying
guides to the army."
One word about the country and I have done. What strikes one about all
South African scenery, north and south, is the simplicity of it; so very
few forms are employed, and they are employed over and over again. The
constant recurrence of these few grave and simple features gives to the
country a singularly childish look. Egyptian art, with its mechanical
repetitions, unchanged and unvaried, has just the same character. Both
are intensely pre-Raphaelite.
South Africa's only idea of a hill, for instance, is the pyramid. There
are about three different kinds of pyramid, and these are reproduced
again and again, as if they were kept all ready made in a box like toys.
There is the simple kopje or cone, not to be distinguished at a little
distance from the constructed pyramids of Egypt, just as regular and
perfect.
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