ile peaks and
ridges. Here a stark, bare wall like a prison which shuts in a city of
men forbidden the blithe world of sun and song and freedom; yonder, a
giant of a lost world stretched out in stony ease, sleeping on, while
over his grey quiet, generations of men pass. First came savage,
warring, brown races alien to each other; then following, white races
with faces tanned and burnt by the sun, and smothered in unkempt beard
and hair--men restless and coarse and brave, and with ancient sins upon
them; but with the Bible in their hands and the language of the
prophets on their lips; with iron will, with hatred as deep as their
race-love is strong; they with their cattle and their herds, and the
clacking wagons carrying homes and fortunes, whose women were
housewives and warriors too. Coming after these, men of fairer aspect,
adventurous, self-willed, intent to make cities in the wilderness; to
win open spaces for their kinsmen, who had no room to swing the hammer
in the workshops of their far-off northern island homes; or who, having
room, stood helpless before the furnaces where the fires had left only
the ashes of past energies.

Up there, these mountains which, like Marathon, look on the sea. But
lower the gaze from the austere hills, slowly to the plains below.
First the grey of the mountains, turning to brown, then the bare bronze
rock giving way to a tumbled wilderness of boulders, where lizards lie
in the sun, where the meerkat startles the gazelle. Then the bronze
merging into a green so deep and strong that it resembles a blanket
spread upon the uplands, but broken by kopjes, shelterless and lonely,
rising here and there like watch-towers. After that, below and still
below, the flat and staring plain, through which runs an ugly rift
turning and twisting like a snake, and moving on and on, till lost in
the arc of other hills away to the east and the south: a river in the
waste, but still only a muddy current stealing between banks baked and
sterile, a sinister stream, giving life to the veld, as some gloomy
giver of good gifts would pay a debt of atonement.

On certain Dark Days of 1899-1900, if you had watched these turgid
waters flow by, your eyes would have seen tinges of red like blood; and
following the stain of red, gashed lifeless things, which had been torn
from the ranks of sentient beings.

Whereupon, lifting your eyes from the river, you would have seen the
answer to your question--masses of men m