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FROM LOWER U M KOM AAS TO ALEXANDRA JUNCTION

AND THE UMZ1NTO BRANCH

The line-side scenery beyond Umkomaas, and extending for forty-six miles to North Shepstone, is incomparably beautiful. The railway where it does not run along the very edge of the white beach which margins the shore, takes us through dense bush, and in no part of South Africa is the country more truly what one pictures as a tropical scene than on the South Coast Line, the scenery is ever-changing and no tunnel may engulf you just as you are enjoying a particular view.

Now we skirt the fringe of the seashore, rock-paved and utterly deserted; the scene is changed, we pierce the sun-illumined avenues of primeval bush, and hear the softening murmur of the ocean : creeper-trellised bowers appear for a moment and are lost : forests of the tall and tattered banana, and huge plumy palm trees succeed the traceries of plants and blooms ; a startled buck bounds swiftly to cover : a school of monkeys are heard chattering together, and a long-tailed bird forges with difficulty through the air.

Again the aspect changes to the broad, white sands. Looking towards the horizon, a steamer is descried, seemingly motionless, and overhead a sea- bird sails in graceful undulations towards it. In a little while green bluffs curtain the view, then broad park-like lands are passed, whose gentle slopes are laid with short, elastic grass, decorated by English-looking shrubs, until the spiky dwarf palm and its kind recur, recalling the tropical.

So on and on we travel, crossing numerous rivers, narrow and wide, open and lagooned, through scenes of unsurpassed exquisiteness, and so close to the ocean that in many places if one's hat dropped out of the carriage window it would fall into the sea.

Between Lower Umkomaas and the following station, Park Rynie, there are five stopping places, viz. : Widenham, Clansthal, the Cascades, Crook's Siding,

Railway Line at Widenham