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DIAMOND
Union
government officials are there at all. Annually they must pack up and
move eight hundred miles south, to Cape Town for the House of Assembly
sessions, accompanied by foreign ministers and other ambassadorial
dignitaries. This was one of the times Pretoria had been deserted for
Cape Town, and all the official residences and buildings were therefore
closed and empty. We peered through noble iron gates at the Prime
Minister's estate and wandered as we liked through the archways of the
Union Building. This is a lovely and impressive sight high on a hill,
built rather in the style of the top tier of an especially elaborate
Colosseum. A great stretch of park land rolls down from its gardens to
the town level. There are rare trees and shrubs; there are statues in
the heroic tradition in Pretoria, with prancing horses and
wreath-bearing Muses: there are, above all, lovely wooded slopes and
spaces continually reminding one of how little room we have left, over
on our side of the equator.
Outside
town we stopped by for a look at the Voortrekkers' monument. This is
well worth seeing if you like monuments, which I don't very much. It is
like a great kiln or truncated gas tank, surrounded by a circular wall
built in lifelike imitation of covered wagons. The entrance is
decorated with bas-relief designs of a pioneer woman and children
wearing sun-bonnets. At this entrance there is no covered-wagon wall;
instead, a great flight of steps leads up to the doorway with its
bas-relief. An iron fence is cunningly fashioned to resemble assagais.
I think there are big guns, too, somewhere in the design, but in this
I may be mistaken. It is all very handsome and clean and fierce and a
little bit meaningless, for to be significant, monuments should be
erected by the people who
