Deneys Reitz and his Journey Over the Swartberg

by Taffy and David Shearing

Following on from the Denys Reitz story, this is a photo of Smuts and commandoes at Okiep in 1902 from a facebook feed: the Boer War Colourised photos page.

Tinus le Roux has produced a book which can be ordered from the facebook page. Colourising the historical Boer War photographs adds a certain pathos and brings home to one how these men, many of then extremely young, rode out to defend their homes and farms against the heavily armed and numerically superior British army. Many died, or were captured and sent to prison camps.

Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts, OM, CH, ED, KC, FRS, with his legal training, administrative, military and negotiating skills, was the quintessential statesman. He served as a Boer General during the Second Boer War and was instrumental in persuading President Steyn, General de Wet, Hertzog, and the twenty-seven other Free State delegates to accept the peace proposals at Vereeniging. Later he served as a British General during WWI and was appointed Field Marshall and served as advisor to both Churchill and King George VI during WWII. He twice served as Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa and contributed to the establishment of both the League of Nations and the United Nations.

The Mermaid at the Waterfall

is a story from Ailsa Tudhope, the Story Weaver which can be read on her website.

Here is another of her tales about the Ghost of Meiringspoort...

Meiringspoort is a natural cutting through the Swartberg mountains, linking the Great and Klein Karoo’s. A road was constructed through the poort in the 1850’s, meandering past a waterfall where the water plunges into a bottomless pool.

Over a hundred years ago a Jewish ‘smous,’ a pedlar, was riding through the Poort with his young coloured handlanger (assistant). As evening fell they tethered their mules and started to make camp on the banks of the river, where they could hear the sound of the waterfall. The smous said he was going to climb up to see it and disappeared into the bush alongside the road, leaving the lad to gather wood and light a fire. 

Time passed, the fire was alight and the mules’ loads lifted and laid on the dusty ground, but the smous hadn’t returned.  The boy was worried, but it was dark and he was too frightened to leave the safety of the firelight, there were strange noises out there and he knew that leopards prowled at night …. So he stayed near the fire and spent a restless night wondering what had happened to his master. 

As the sky lightened with the dawn, it takes a while for the light to reach the foot of the massive sandstone walls of Meiringspoort, he climbed towards the waterfall, hoping to find the smous sitting alongside the path, perhaps he had twisted his ankle or it had become too dark for him to find his way back to the fire.  But a worse fate had befallen the unfortunate pedlar. His body lay face down in the dark, round pool at the foot of the waterfall - he had drowned. Lured to his death by the mermaid’s song.

The tale doesn’t end there. The boy made his way to the nearby toll house to find help. The smous was lifted from the pool and buried in Oudtshoorn. But then reports started coming in about strange encounters at dusk on the Meiringspoort road... a dark shape was seen alongside the road, a man walked towards wagons and pony traps, waving for them to stop, and if they did, he disappeared before the drivers’ eyes. 

The reports continue to this day, from time to time motorists will see a man in a long coat at the side of the road waving them down. Few people pick up hitchhikers today, but those  who pull to the side and look back, expecting to see him coming towards the car, find there’s no-one there, and they drive on, wondering what it was that they saw.

Stories soon to be published here will include the following:

The Boy and the Horse

The Statue on the Koppie

Herrie's Pink Elephant in Meiringspoort