The Cape Girardeau Democrat. (Cape Girardeau, Mo.) 1876-1909, 1900-09-22
FIRE SWEEPS THE VELDT.
Substituting Picture Of Terror and
Desolation in the South
African Plains.

enemy hold the heights and watch
us moving outward, while between
them and us, stretching mile after
mile in a line with our column, rip
pies a line of scarlet flame, for the
foe has fired the veldt to starve the
transit mules, horses and oxen, says
the London News. Like a sword I'M
sheathed in the sunlight the flames
sparkle amid the grass, which grows
knee deep right to the kopje's very
lips. Birds rise on the wing with
harsh resonant cries, f1utter awhile
above their ravished home, then wheel
in midair and seek more peaceful
pastures. Hares spring up before the
cracking flames quite reach their
forms, and, like gray streaks in a
sailors beard, flash suddenly into
view and as suddenly disappear again.
Here and there a graceful spring
buck dashes through the smoke, with
head thrown back and graceful limbs
extended. his glossy mottled hide
looking doubly beautiful backed by
that red streak of fire. The wind
catches the %quivering crimson streak
and for awhile the flames race, as I
have see wild horses neck to neck
rush through the saltbush plains at
the sound of the stockman's whip.
Then, as the wind drops, the flames
curl carelessly around the wealth of
growing fodder, biting the grass low
down and wrapping it in a mantle of
black and red as flame and smoke
commingle.
Here and there a pool of water,
hidden from view until the fire fiend
stripped the veldt land bare, leaps to
life like a silver shield in the grim
setting of the bare and blackened
plain. Small mobs of cattle stand
stupidity shutting the smoke-laden air
until the breath of the blaze awakens
them to a of peril; then with
horns lowered like bayonets at a
charge, with tails stiff and straight
behind them as leveled lances, they
leap onward, over or through every
thing in front of them, believing
their brute protest against
the red ruin of war. The flames roll
on, they reach the stone walls of a
pen and leap it as a hunter
takes a brush fence in his stride, on
ward still until a Kaffir kraal is
reached. The soft-tipped pillows kiss
the uncouth mud wall and for a mo-
ment. t%ransfigure them with a name
less beauty, the beauty that precedes
ruin. Only a moment or two and
then the resistless destroyer fiaunts
its pennons amid the reed-thatched
roofs, the sparks leap up. the black
curls toward the sky, while on
the neighboring hills the negro wom-
en- with their babes in their arms wall
woefully, for those rude huts, with
all their barbarous trappings, meant
.ome-aye, home and happiness to
them. The flames roll onward, now
two long lines, for the Kafir en-
had sundered them. and
now they look, with their beautifully
rounded curves sweeping so graceful
" out into the unknown, like the rich.
lips of a wanton woman in the
pride of her shameless beauty. All
that they leave behind is desolation,
only blackened walls, simmering car
,asses, weeping women and wailing
children.
Away on our right flank we can
iost make out the skeletons of what
few hours before had been a cluster
If smiling farmhouses. They do not
now; they grin horribly in the
sunlight, grin as the fieshless skulls |
If dead men grin on a battlefield after
hose sections of the veldt-the gray
hooded, curved-beaked vultures-have
screamed their final farewell to the
houses of war, noble war,
war, pastime of %potentates
md princes. invented in hades and
patented in all the temples of sorrow.