Book Description

Excerpt from The Old Transport Road The Great Transport Roads of South Africa were different from any other highways in the world. When, if ever, there arises some one capable of putting the whole Romance of Africa into a book which will live, he must, of necessity, devote nearly half of his pages to the Road and the life of the men of the Road. True, nowadays, they tell me that the Great Northern Road is abandoned, washed away, well-nigh obliterated in many places; that the Railway has killed all real Transport as we knew it, the strings of twenty, thirty, fifty wagons, even; that only small by-roads remain, mere off-shoots of the Railway, and that the latter-day transport rider reckons a journey of a weeks duration a long one. The Old Road was the forerunner of the Railway; it made the Railway possible; the new roads exist because of the Railway - a totally different matter. The fascination of the Transport Road was immense, overpowering - at least to those who had any imagination, any love of Nature, any desire for personal freedom, any ideal beyond the mere sordid business of money-getting. It did not lead to places, to Palapye, to Bulawayo, to the Victoria Falls. It led through them, past them. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.