land unslaked of barbarism. He realized all at once how little these
men around him represented the land in which they were living, and how
much they were part of the far-off land which was now in the throes of
war.

To these men this was in one sense an alien country. Through the dulled
noises of London there came to their ears the click of the wheels of a
cape-wagon, the crack of the Kaffir's whip, the creak of the
disselboom. They followed the spoor of a company of elephants in the
East country, they watched through the November mist the blesbok flying
across the veld, a herd of quaggas taking cover with the rheebok, or a
cloud of locusts sailing out of the sun to devastate the green lands.
Through the smoky smell of London there came to them the scent of the
wattle, the stinging odour of ten thousand cattle, the reek of a native
kraal, the sharp sweetness of orange groves, the aromatic air of the
karoo, laden with the breath of a thousand wild herbs. Through the
drizzle of the autumn rain they heard the wild thunderbolt tear the
trees from earthly moorings. In their eyes was the livid lightning that
searched in spasms of anger for its prey, while there swept over the
brown, aching veld the flood which filled the spruits, which made the
rivers seas, and ploughed fresh channels through the soil. The luxury
of this room, with its shining mahogany tables, its tapestried walls,
its rare fireplace and massive overmantel brought from Italy, its
exquisite stained-glass windows, was only part of a play they were
acting; it was not their real life.

And now there was not one of them that saw anything incongruous in the
whip of rhinoceros-hide lying on the table, or clinched in Barry
Whalen's hand. On the contrary, it gave them a sense of supreme
naturalness. They had lived in a land where the sjambok was the symbol
of progress. It represented the forward movement of civilization in the
wilderness. It was the vierkleur of the pioneer, without which the long
train of capewagons, with the oxen in longer coils of effort, would
never have advanced; without which the Kaffir and the Hottentot would
have sacrificed every act of civilization. It prevented crime, it
punished crime, it took the place of the bowie-knife and the derringer
of that other civilization beyond the Mississippi; it was the lock to
the door in the wild places, the open sesame to the territories where
native chiefs ruled communal tribes by playing tyrant to the