l size. He sat and hovered about that mountain for a long
time, and the people were persuaded it was a griffin. It frequently
carried off sheep and calves, and at length began to destroy the cows,
on which orders were given to destroy it, and it was accordingly shot,
its skin stuffed, and sent home as a curiosity to the Company. No such
bird, has been seen since, and the oldest people of the colony do not
remember to have heard of any such before.[5]

[Footnote 5: This was probably a stray Condor, and its size an
ordinary exaggeration, in the passage of the story, like that of _the
three black crows_.--E.]

Africa has been long famous for serpents, and there are such vast
numbers of them in the neighbourhood of the Cape, that many of them
have no names. Most of them are extremely venomous, and the colonists
would suffer much more than they do from them, were it not that they
have a specific remedy for their bites, not known in Europe. This
remedy is the _serpent-stone_, allowed to be factitious, and is
brought from India, where they are made by the bramins who have the
secret of composing them, which they so carefully conceal, that no
Europeans have hitherto been able to discover how they are made. The
serpent-stone is about the size of a bean, white in the middle, but of
a fine sky-blue on the outside. When a person is bitten by a serpent,
this stone is applied to the wound, to which it soon sticks fast of
itself, without the aid of any bandage or plaister. The part bitten
begins immediately to swell and becomes inflamed. The stone also
swells till it becomes full of the venom, and then drops off. It is
then put into warm milk, where it soon purges itself from the venom,
and resumes its natural colour, after which it is again applied to the
wound, where it sticks as before, till a second time full, and so on
till all the venom is extracted and the cure perfected.

All the mountains of this vast country are full of minerals and
crystal, with many things of great value, if they could be got at;
but the natives are so fearful of being made slaves in the mines, that
they take all imaginable pains to conceal them. There is particularly
a mountain, about 500 leagues from the Cape, called _Copper-mountain_,
which is supposed to contain great quantities of metals. Large
quantities of copper have been found here, which is said to contain a
mixture of gold. Some Europeans endeavoured to follow the natives, who
were suspected