er, even though he knows it not; for it has sunk so deep
into him that he is unaware of it. He belongs not to this age, nor to
any age we know.

For one long year, twenty years ago, I lived upon a great plain in
Australia, and now I remembered how slowly I had been able to divest
myself of my feeling of loneliness. But when I came at last to be at
home upon that mighty stretch of earth, which seemed a summit, I grew to
love it and to see with opened eyes its infinite charm that could be
told to none. I knew that the need of much talk was a false need: as
false as the diseased craving for books.

To feel this was true of the widespread wandering folks who once came
out of crowded Holland to resume a more ancient type, instructed me in
what a false relation they stand to the rolling dun war-cloud of
"Progress." They called in the unreverted Hollander to stand between
them and the men of mines, and now they love the Hollander as a man
loves a hated cousin, who is a man of his blood, but in nothing like
him. But anything was, and is, better than to stand face to face with
busy crowds. To have to talk, to argue, to explain to the unsympathetic
was overmuch. The veldt called to them: it is their passion. As one
labours in London and sinks into a dream, remembering the hills wherein
he spends a lonely summer, among Westmorland's fells and by the becks,
so the Boer, called cityward, looks back upon the wide and lonely veldt
which is never too wide and never lonelier to him than to any of the
beasts he loves to hunt.

But the fauna disappear, and ancient civilisations crumble. And those
who revert are once more overwhelmed by civilisation. It is a great and
pathetic story, a story as old as the tales told in stone by the
preserved remnants of prehistoric monsters.

Yet, speaking of monsters, what is a stranger monster (to an eye that
hates it or merely wonders) than the many-jointed Rand demon crawling
along the line of banked outcrop? I saw it first by day, when it seemed
an elongated wire-drawn Manchester in a pure air, but I remember it
best as I saw it when returning from Pretoria. First I beheld the gleam
of electric lights, and remembered the glow of Fargo in Eastern Dakota
as I saw it across the prairie. Then the mines were no longer separate:
they joined together and became like a fiery reptile, a dragon in the
outcrop, clawing deep with every joint, wounding the earth with every
claw, as a centipede wounds with ever