he ran in towards the bird as hard as he
could go. When he had covered ten paces the _pauw_ was rising, but they
are heavy birds, and he was within forty yards before it was fairly on
the wing. Then he pulled up and fired both barrels of No. 4 into it.
Down it came, and, incautious man, he rushed forward in triumph without
reloading his gun. Already was his hand outstretched to seize the prize,
when, behold! the great wings spread themselves out and the bird was
flying away. John stood dancing upon the veldt, but observing that it
settled within a couple of hundred yards, he ran back, mounted his pony,
and pursued it. As he drew near it rose again, and flew this time
a hundred yards only, and so it went on till at last he got within
gun-shot of the king of birds and killed it.

By this time he was across the mountain-top, and on the brink of the
most remarkable chasm he had ever seen. The place was known as Lion's
Kloof, or Leeuwen Kloof in Dutch, because three lions had once been
penned up by a party of Boers and shot there. This chasm or gorge was
between a quarter and half a mile long, about six hundred feet in width,
and a hundred and fifty to a hundred and eighty feet deep. Evidently it
owed its origin to the action of running water, for at its head, just to
the right of where John Niel stood, a little stream welling from hidden
springs in the flat mountain-top trickled from stratum to stratum,
forming a series of crystal pools and tiny waterfalls, till at last it
reached the bottom of the mighty gorge, and pursued its way through
it to the plains beyond, half-hidden by the umbrella-topped mimosa and
other thorns that were scattered about. Without doubt this little stream
was the parent of the ravine it trickled down and through, but, wondered
John Niel, how many centuries of patient, never-ceasing flow must
have been necessary to the vast result before him? First centuries
of saturation of the soil piled on and between the bed rocks that lay
beneath it and jutted up through it, then centuries of floods caused
by rain and perhaps by melting snows, to carry away the loosened mould;
then centuries upon centuries more of flowing and of rainfall to wash
the debris clean and complete the colossal work.

I say the rocks that jutted up through the soil, for the kloof was not
clean cut. All along its sides, and here and there in its arena, stood
mighty columns or fingers of rock, not solid indeed, but formed by huge
boul