the sky, but ready to swoop, keenscented and keen-visioned, upon any stray carrion. They have high feasting and a merry carnival when a wave of horse-sickness (that strange and fatal malady) has passed across the veldt, or the lung-sickness has decimated the oxen. In the heat of the day the ox-waggon stands idly by some public outspan, looking with its canvas tent like a stranded ship of the desert. The ox-waggon, with its labouring spans of sixteen or twenty oxen, is a familiar feature of the scenery. Certain public places are allotted in the veldt as outspans, and round these, in the lazy hours of midday, a motley crew of Hottentot drivers, kurveyors (carriers), dogs and horses, are gathered together.

It is wonderful how plants and shrubs thrive here where a season of drought often prevails for many years in succession, and sends the trek-bokken down in myriads from the north like locusts. Famine makes them collect in troops and migrate with a steady ravening instinct upon the more cultivated parts of the colony. have a terrible struggle for existence. Fortunately nature has given to the desert plants long and succulent tubers reaching deep down in the earth, and the kengwe (water-melon) is a wonderful instance of a juicy vegetable flourishing in the midst of desolation. In the Kalihari it is the hope and stay of the adventurous traveller. There is a great redeeming feature about the desert life in its comparative healthiness. No steaming morasses, oozing with rank and rotting vegetation, carry disease and death with them, as in the low fever-haunted coast districts around Delagoa Bay. Even the germs of death seem to be withered up.

Plants and animals

A not uncommon wind, especially in the northern and eastern districts

1 The springbok when migrating south in times of drought are so called: nothing then seems able to frighten or turn them from their

course.

of the Cape Colony, is the northwest. It comes from the Kalihari, and howls over the plain with dull monotonous fury. It is always dry, but sometimes it feels as if it came from the mouth of a furnace charged with heat and electricity. A moist bit of paper when exposed to it momentarily seems to shrivel up. It is a thirsty and a thirst-giving tyrant blinding the eyes and chapping the lips. What benighted traveller in South Africa has not felt it, and listened to its dull roar and angry blustering? The loose corrugated-iron roof of any small up country caravanserai can do little to keep it out, and sleep is rendered almost impossible. A strange sight too is the whirlwind of the veldt, not the sweeping tornado, but the miniature creation of the hour, the tiny disturbance of a still summer day. Its sign is a thin spiral column of dust collected from the well-worn track or road, and mounting up in eddying circles. Dried sticks and leaves, as well as dust, are forced to take part in this elfish gambol, and in contrast with the swooning silence of the noon it seems like spirit of unrest, a sprite or fiend playing a merry prank and mocking the solemn monotony of the quivering radiating landscape, a strange fancy, a witty anomaly, a tempest in a calm, a rushing hurricane in a "doldrum" space of earth. But the quaint morris-dance is soon over, the flaw expends itself, and the thin column of dust melts away imperceptibly in mid air, and silence broods again.

In the midst of this strange country an African Boer will often build his house and lead a pastoral life, the lord of all he surveys. The glistening walls of his whitewashed house, the steely light from the corrugated iron roof above the stoop (verandah), the rude mimosa-fenced hut, with the inevitable dam of muddy and discoloured water, and the inevitable blue gum towering in lonely glory close by, are conspicuous objects in the wide karroo. He is leagues away from his

drop (village), which nestles in some distant kloof (valley), and he rarely sees his more fortunate neighbours who own a mountain farm. If the rules of his Protestant Church did not demand his presence four times a year at the kirk, to partake of the nacht-maal (or night-feast, as the sacrament is there termed by them), he would be almost completely lost. In a certain grandeur of a rude desert description he reigns as the owner of broad acres and countless flocks of sheep and goats. But his lot is a hard and narrow one, as our idea of life and its many sympathies and wide interests go. The mental wilderness is worse than the actual one. Until very recently, few books, newspapers, or literature of any kind, except, perhaps, an old family Bible which has served as a register of births, deaths, and marriages, have graced the home of a South African Boer in these up-country regions. The angel of desolation seemed to spread her wings over the place, and man appeared willing to go back to the primitive acorneating epoch. The descendants of educated Huguenot settlers forgot the arts and education of their forefathers. Perhaps they clung most to the Puritanism of their religious creed, and viewed man and nature in the midst of the freest physical life imaginable with the narrowest theological vision. Calvinism hardens men's hearts, especially in a black man's country. The strict disciples of predestinarianism have conceived of no bridge between the nature of black and white. On this side the sheep and on the other the goats, and a great gulf between the two now and hereafter. This lonely life has been an evil thing for the Boers. It has crystallised their conceptions, and made them bigots and zealots. Now and then the old Covenanter's intensity of thought reveals itself in morbid speculations and imaginings as another kind of light dawns upon the solitary farm-house, and echoes are heard of the great world out

side. Suddenly the foundations of a strict and terribly hard faith are broken up, and the uneducated mind is hopelessly at loss to find solace. The great lonely brooding veldt presses with its solitude and barrenness upon the scarcely awakened conscience, and the result is despair, desolation, and utter scepticism. It is the penalty Calvinism pays for its Pharisaic burdens and joylessness. It is a noteable fact that the Dutch Boer, when once freed from the terrors of his Church, has no intellectual or spiritual prop to lean upon, and is completely anarchical. No poetry or history has made for him a spiritual heritage in the country; the mind is at the mercy of the physical surroundings, and becomes hardened and materialised.

It will be gathered that life in the veldt is hard enough to bear, except for the mind educated elsewhere which can pause a little and brood over its contrasts. Nature, there, is often sublime in her aspects, especially at night. It often happens that as the sun sets the desert wind dies down. Then, with a suddenness of which dwellers in northern climes have little conception, the stars leap forth in myriads upon the sky, the Milky Way spans the blue vault with a twinkling zone of light, and soon, it may be, the great clear queen of night rises up behind the mountain, and throws a silvery flood upon the landscape, hiding its ugly scars and rents and brown ruggedness with a soft mantle. There are no creeping mists or billowy clouds. All is clear and still. Perhaps the jackals and antelope are afoot, and the sharp short bark of the former and the belling of the bush-buck reach us from the mountain side. The night-owl hawks slowly and solemnly by, and the kiwie utters aloft his well-known whistling cry, sharp and clear, like the curlew's note along the shores of the distant north. But the terrors of the day have fled, and peace is over hut and kraal.

But turn from the deserts of the interior to the bosch and forest

country of the south, and we find a wonderful contrast. There, desolation; here, verdure; there, treeless wildernesses; here, kloofs and hills crowned with a wealth of trees; there, one unvarying brightness staring upon a parched and stony landscape; here, the broken shafts of light falling upon emerald nooks; there, parched lands, dried watercourses, and a gaping, deepfissured veldt; here, streams and brooklets, falling with pleasant sound past the undulating valleys till they rush into the sea. From the Knysna Heads and Plettenburg Bay, to the Bluff at Natal, the coast-line for some hundreds of miles is well-wooded and well-watered. It is in direct contrast to the low-lying, scrubby, and whitesanded shores of the west coast, that stretch from Table Bay to the nearly waterless littoral of Walvisch Bay and the German colony. It is on the east of South Africa, in the ranges of hills that culminate in the Quathlamba, that we must look for the main watershed of the country. Parts of the Kaffrarian coast look from the sea like English park scenery, with clumps of trees scattered over a smiling land. Beyond are the mountains, which seem nearly always here to follow the line of the coast, and give birth to those numerous rivers which tumble hurriedly and noisily from their lofty sources through picturesque gorges into the Indian Ocean-such as the Bashee, Umzimkulu, and Umzimvubu.

In the Cape Colony itself perhaps the best piece of forest scenery is found in the Knysna district, close under the blue ranges of the Outeniqua Mountains, which bear the name of the ancient Hottentot clan. Unfortunately there is comparatively little real forest in the Cape Colony. Out of the whole two hundred thousand square miles of surface, only two hundred and thirty thousand acres in the Cape are covered by the primeval forest. To the traveller wearied with the open country these forest glades are inexpressibly grateful. Here is the home of the tall Knysna lily, the

noblest of the thousand gladioli which cover the slopes in spring; here the arum raises its pure white petals up through the soft beds of maidenhair fern in the twilight of a deep and solemn combe; here the tree-ferns spread over the water-worn rocks their fan-shaped foliage, and here the yellow-tree towers aloft like some grave and reverend ancestor of the forest, with flowing white beard of lichen gracing his gnarled and twisted limbs. He stands proudly and loftily, like a monarch in the serene superiority of strength, lording it well in these silent nooks, where the ruthless axe has not yet been heard.

A distinction has been drawn between the forest properly so called and the bosch country. The extent of the latter is calculated at two million four hundred thousand acres. Along the south-east corner of the Cape the Addo Bush is best known. The elephants still roam along these tracts, and occasionally make marauding expeditions into gardens and mealie plots. In their inquisitive zeal they have been known to tear up the telegraph poles along the line that runs from Port Elizabeth to Grahamstown. I have myself seen a herd of them feeding quietly within easy range of the railway. It is convenient, however, to speak of the "bush" and "forest" as if they meant the same thing. The one passes easily and naturally into the other. The taller trees merit the grander name, and, unfortunately for South Africa, there are comparatively so few of them, if we compare their number with the inexhaustible forest wealth of Canada and New Zealand. The Cape woods are, however, of great value; there is the Cape box-wood, worth, it is said, a penny per cubic inch for engraving purposes; the sneeze-wood, with its bitter taste like the green-heart, firm and strong and proof against insects and rot; there is the African oak, called by the name of stink-wood, and the yellow-wood of the yew class, and termed the

pine of South Africa. The assegaiwood is best known as the wood from which the Kaffir tribes make the shafts of their lances. But in the Knysna forest the smaller trees are countless in number. Perhaps the two most striking are the yellow-wood and the wild horse-chestnut. The first is a splendid tree, with beautiful foliage, and may claim royal honours. The chestnut, with its snow-white blossoms raised above the evergreen shrubs of the forest, is a notable feature of the landscape.

The bosch or forest country is, indeed, different from the veldt. Let a traveller, who has expended his money and energies on the exploration of the interior plateaux, try a short trip to the southern belt of forest which stretches from the Knysna to Humansdorp. He will find a decent road cut by convict labour right through the heart of the forest country that lies between the Long Kloof and the sea. He will pass along a hundred miles of noble and romantic scenery. There is a spot by a stream called the Groot Rivier, close by the sea, on the shores of Plettenburg Bay, where I spent some delightful weeks. Sea, river, and hill here meet in noble rivalry. It is the ideal home for a naturalist and a lover of wild scenery. The sights and sounds of nature are far different from those of the open veldt. The cunning loeri, with his bright bronzecoloured plumage flashing in the sun, loves here to dart and hide among the lichen-covered boughs, making the hillside reverberate with his quaint, guttural cooing. The lachter-bird, from his perch high up, makes the welkin ring with his merry peal, and the troops of little Cape canaries twitter and warble along in the boughs below. The spreo, a well-known member of the Sturnidæ, whistles loudly from the beetling krantz (cliffs) not unlike our English starling. Now and then the gruff "haw haw of the baboons reach us from a distance. Perhaps the crafty Cape leopard is prowling

round the troop with fell design of seizing and carrying off a young one, which, with the indiscretion of youth, has roamed away from the protection of the mannikin baboon, the natural guardian of the troop. The antelope here are different from those of the veldt. Instead of the little steinbok and springbok, we find the bush-buck and the blue-buck. Often, as we turn round the bole of some tree, we can hear the sudden snort of alarm the blue-buck raises on the approach of man. He is the smallest and most beautiful, and also the most inquisitive, of all the African antelope. Tarry long enough by the spot from which you have roused him, and you will see him coming back, creeping slily on a reconnoitring expedition, with his beautiful lustrous eyes. The elephants and buffaloes are the primitive engineers of this country; and without their broad well-trampled paths the sportsman would have little chance of getting at his game in the thick deep scrub.

To describe the berg or mountain scenery of South Africa is not so easy though it is sufficiently distinctive. The highest peaks are in the northeast of the Cape Colony and along the Drakenburg range, but nowhere do they reach the line of perpetual snow. The Compassberg is about eight thousand feet, and as we travel westward the elevation decreases until we reach the Kamiesberg and Roggeveldt Mountains. Two distinct series of ranges are traceable on the map of South Africa. One series beginning from Quathlamba, and forming the chief watershed of the Orange River, is the retaining wall, as it were, of the interior plateau. The second line includes a well-marked range from the Zuurberg and the Winterhoek to the Cedar Mountains. It is nearly parallel to the first, and forms a distinct plateau. Along the coast there are a series of subsidiary and less continuous ranges, less marked in character. Corresponding with these elevations there is a variety of climate