le about it. I began to
ask myself how it was that, with one eminent exception, our African
fiction writers had confined themselves to the native races, and the
friction between these races and white men, Boer or English, when there
were infinitely more attractive themes at hand. Perhaps it may seem like
begging the question to call the political inter-play of the Cape
Colony, of the Transvaal, and the Free State more interesting than tales
in which the highest "white" interest appears in a love story betwixt
some English wanderer and an impossible Boer maiden, or such as relate
the rise and fall of Chaka and Ketchwayo. And yet to me the mass of
intrigue, the political friction, the onward march of races, and the
conflicts above and below board, called for greater attention than the
Zulu, even at his best.

To a novelist (who sometimes pretends to think, however much such an
unpopular tendency be hidden) environment and its necessary results are
of infinite interest. Upon the Karroo, even when in the train, I tried
to build up the aloof and lonely Boer, and, though I failed, there came
to me in whiffs (like far odours borne on a westerly wind) some
suggestions that I really understood deep in my mind how he came to be.
The chill fresh air of the morning, before the sun was yet above the
horizon, recalled to me some ancient dawns in far Australia: and then
again I thought of days upon the Texan plateaux. But still the secret of
the lone-riding Boer, who loves a country of magnificent distances,
escaped me.

But one early dawn, when I was half-way between Krugersdorp and
Mafeking, I came out upon the veldt in darkness, which was a lucid
darkness, and in the silent crisp air I stumbled upon the truth. Betwixt
sleep and waking as I walked I felt infinite peace pour over me. So had
the silent Campo Santo at Pisa affected me; so had I felt for a moment
among the ancient ruins of the abbey at Rivaulx. In this dawn hour came
a time of reversion. I too was very solitary, and loved my solitude. The
necessities of civilisation were necessities no more: I needed luxury
even less than I needed news. I cared for nothing that the men of a city
ask: there was space before me and room to ride. The lack of small
urgent stimuli, the barren growth of civilisation's weedy fields, left
me to the great and simple organic impulses of the outstretched world.
And in that moment I perceived that this silence is the very life of the
wandering Bo