e
men have built towns upon it, but all else is changed. Then it was black
with game when the grass was green; yes, at times I have seen it so
black for miles that we could scarcely see the grass. There were
all sorts of them, springbucks in myriads, blesbok and quagga and
wildebeeste in thousands, sable antelope, sassaby and hartebeeste in
herds, eland, giraffe and koodoo in troops; while the forests were
full of elephant and the streams of sea-cow. They are all gone now, the
beautiful wild creatures; the guns of the white men have killed them
out or driven them away, and I suppose that it is as well that they are
gone, for while the game is in such plenty the men will not work. Still
I for one am sorry to lose the sight of them, and had it not been for
their numbers we Boers should never have lasted through that long trek,
for often and often we lived upon buck's flesh and little else for weeks
together.

At Thaba Nchu we camped, waiting for other bands of emigrants, but
after four or five months some of our number grew so impatient that they
started off by themselves. Among these were the companies under the Heer
Triegaart and the Heer Rensenburg, who wished us to accompany him, but
Jan would not, I do not know why. It was as well, for the knob-nosed
Kaffirs killed him and everybody with him. Triegaart, who had separated
from him, trekked to Delagoa Bay, and reached it, where nearly all his
people died of fever.

After that we moved northwards in detachments, instead of keeping
together as we should have done, with the result that several of our
parties were fallen upon and murdered by the warriors of Moselikatse.
Our line of march was between where Bloemfontein and Winburg now stand
in the Orange Free State, and it was south of the Vaal, not far from the
Rhenoster River that Moselikatse attacked us.

I cannot tell the tale of all this way, I can only tell of what I saw
myself. We were of the party under the leadership of Carl Celliers,
afterwards an elder of the church at Kronnstadt. Celliers went on a
commission to Zoutpansberg to spy out the land, and it was while he was
away that so many families were cut off by Moselikatse, the remainder
of them, with such of their women and children as were left alive,
retreating to our laager. Then Celliers returned from his commission,
and we retired to a place called Vechtkop, near the Rhenoster River;
altogether we numbered not more than fifty or sixty souls, including