id
wastes of Damaraland, maintaining (except along the lower course of the
Orange River) an altitude of from 3000 to 4000 feet above the sea, until
within a comparatively short distance of the Atlantic Ocean.

The physical structure of the country is thus extremely simple. There is
only one considerable mountain-chain, with a vast table-land filling the
interior behind it, and a rough, hilly country lying between the
mountains and the low belt which borders on the Indian Ocean. Let the
reader suppose himself to be a traveller wishing to cross the continent
from east to west. Starting from a port, say Delagoa Bay or Beira, on
the Portuguese coast, the traveller will in a few hours, by either of
the railways which run westward from those ports, traverse the low strip
which divides them from the hill-country. To ascend the valleys and
cross the water-shed of the great Quathlamba Range on to the plateau
takes a little longer, yet no great time. Then, once upon the plateau,
the traveller may proceed steadily to the west for more than a thousand
miles over an enormous stretch of high but nearly level land, meeting no
considerable eminence and crossing no perceptible water-shed till he
comes within sight of the waves of the Atlantic. Or if he turns to the
north-west he will pass over an undulating country, diversified only by
low hills, till he dips slowly into the flat and swampy ground which
surrounds Lake Ngami, itself rather a huge swamp than a lake, and
descends very gradually from that level to the banks of the Zambesi, in
the neighbourhood of the great Victoria Falls. In fact, this great
plateau is South Africa, and all the rest of the country along the
sea-margin a mere appendage to it. But so large a part of the plateau
is, as we shall see presently, condemned by its dryness to remain
sterile and very thinly peopled, that the interior has not that
preponderating importance which its immense area might seem to give it.

It is not worth while to describe the minor ridges,--though some of
them, especially in Cape Colony, are abrupt and high enough to be called
Mountains,--for none has any great importance as affecting either
material or historical conditions. The longest are those which run
parallel to the dreary and almost uninhabited west coast, and form the
terraces by which the great plateau sinks down to the margin of the
Atlantic. Neither can I touch on the geology, except to observe that a
great part of the plate