au, especially in the northern part and towards
the north-east end of the Quathlamba Range, consists of granite or
gneiss, and is believed to be of very great antiquity, _i.e._, to have
stood, as it now stands, high above the level of the sea from a very
remote period of the earth's history. The rocks of the Karroo region are
more recent. Nowhere in South Africa has any area of modern volcanic
action, much less any active volcano, been discovered. More ancient
eruptive rocks, such as greenstones and porphyries, are of frequent
occurrence, and are often spread out in level sheets above the
sedimentary beds of the Karroo and of the Basutoland and Free State
ranges.

Finally, it must be noted that the coast has extremely few harbours.
From Cape Town eastward and north-eastward there is no sheltered
deep-water haven till one reaches that of Durban, itself troubled by a
bar, and from Durban to the Zambesi no good ports save Delagoa Bay and
Beira. On the other side of the continent, Saldanha Bay, twenty miles
north of Cape Town, is an excellent harbour. After that the Atlantic
coast shows none for a thousand miles.

So much for the surface and configuration of the country. Now let us
come to the climate, which is a not less important element in making
South Africa what it is.

The heat is, of course, great, though less great than a traveller from
North Africa or India expects to find in such a latitude. Owing to the
vast mass of water in the southern hemisphere, that hemisphere is cooler
in the same latitude than is the northern. Cape Town, in latitude 34 deg.
S., has a colder winter and not so hot a summer as Gibraltar and
Aleppo, in latitude 36 deg. N. Still the summer temperature is high even at
Durban, in latitude 30 deg. S., while the northern part of the Transvaal
Republic, and all the territories of the British South Africa Company,
including Matabililand and Mashonaland, lie within the tropic of
Capricorn, that is to say, correspond in latitude to Nubia and the
central provinces of India between Bombay and Calcutta.

The climate is also, over most of the country, extremely dry. Except in
a small district round Cape Town, at the southern extremity of the
continent, there is no proper summer and winter, but only a dry season,
the seven or eight months when the weather is colder, and a wet season,
the four or five months when the sun is highest. Nor are the rains that
fall in the wet season so copious and continuous