down over the
horizon their topmasts disappeared. Above them sailed too the phantom
fleet of the clouds, shot with light, shining like silver, airy as
racing yachts, yet casting here and there exaggerated shadows below.

The sky in Africa is always very wide, greater than any other skies.
Between horizon and horizon is more space than any other world contains.
It is as though the cup of heaven had been pressed a little flatter;
so that while the boundaries have widened, the zenith, with its flaming
sun, has come nearer. And yet that is not a constant quantity either. I
have seen one edge of the sky raised straight up a few million miles, as
though some one had stuck poles under its corners, so that the western
heaven did not curve cup-wise over to the horizon at all as it did
everywhere else, but rather formed the proscenium of a gigantic stage.
On this stage they had piled great heaps of saffron yellow clouds, and
struck shafts of yellow light, and filled the spaces with the lurid
portent of a storm-while the twenty thousand foot mountains below,
crouched whipped and insignificant to the earth.

We sat atop our butte for an hour while H. looked through his 'scope.
After the soft silent immensity of the earth, running away to infinity,
with its low waves, and its scattered fleet of hills, it was with
difficulty that we brought our gaze back to details and to things near
at hand. Directly below us we could make out many different-hued specks.
Looking closely, we could see that those specks were game animals. They
fed here and there in bands of from ten to two hundred, with valleys and
hills between. Within the radius of the eye they moved, nowhere crowded
in big herds, but everywhere present. A band of zebras grazed the side
of one of the earth waves, a group of gazelles walked on the skyline,
a herd of kongoni rested in the hollow between. On the next rise was a
similar grouping; across the valley a new variation. As far as the eye
could strain its powers it could make out more and ever more beasts. I
took up my field glasses, and brought them all to within a sixth of the
distance. After amusing myself for some time in watching them, I swept
the glasses farther on. Still the same animals grazing on the hills and
in the hollows. I continued to look, and to look again, until even
the powerful prismatic glasses failed to show things big enough to
distinguish. At the limit of extreme vision I could still make out game,
and