The Cape and the Kaffirs Author:Harriet Ward Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INFORMATION FOR EMIGRANTS. 13 " The district is everywhere covered with vegetation, either in the form of luxuriant grass, which grows to a great height, or t... more »horns and low bushes. Timber trees only grow in kloofs on sides of hills, excepting a belt which runs along the sea- coast. " Water abounds in every part, and flowing streams cross the path at intervals of only a few miles. In the winter some of these become dry, but then water may always be obtained at moderate distances. " The soil is in all cases well adapted for cultivation, and oil the alluvial lands near rivers particularly so, producing much larger crops than are ever grown in the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope. " The rocks which occur in the district, as far as I have yet seen, are granite, basalt, and members of the trap family, slate, sandstone, and shale. " Coal containing but little bituminous matter occurs in in beds in the sandstone. In a kloof near the drift of the Bushman's River, there is a bed nine inches thick. This is the nearest locality I am aware of to Pietermaritzburg ; it is distant about sixty-three miles. It is more abundant to the north-west, and I observed it in a small river near Biggar's Berg, in about latitude 28 7' S., and longitude 29 25' E., in a bed six feet thick, and of good quality; it is here cut through by a vein of trap." CHAPTER II.—Information For Emigrants. As it is my wish to put nothing but trustworthy informa- ' tion into the hands of those who may be meditating so very important a step as removing themselves and all that they value far from their native land, I have carefully abstracted the following statements from the last Colonization Circular, issued (March, 1850) by Her Majesty's Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners. " The Government Emigrati...« less