ambush
and for retreat. Nowadays a large part of the bush-covered land is used
for ostrich-farms, and it is, indeed, fit for little else. The scrub is
mostly dry, while the larger forests are comparatively damp, and often
beautiful with flowering trees, small tree-ferns, and flexile climbers.
But the trees are not lofty enough to give any of that dignity which a
European forest, say in England or Germany or Norway, often possesses,
and as the native kinds are mostly evergreens, their leaves have
comparatively little variety of tint. One of the most graceful is the
curious silver-tree, so called from the whitish sheen of one side of its
leaves, which grows abundantly on the slopes of Table Mountain, but is
found hardly anywhere else in the Colony.

If this is the character of the woods within reach of the coast rains,
much more conspicuous is the want of trees and the poorness of those
scattered here and there on the great interior plateau. In the desert
region, that is to say, the Karroo, the northern part of Cape Colony to
the Orange River, western Bechuanaland, and the German territories of
Namaqualand and Damaraland, there are hardly any trees, except small,
thorny mimosas (they are really acacias, the commonest being _Acacia
horrida_), whose scanty, light-green foliage casts little shade. On the
higher mountains, where there is a little more moisture, a few other
shrubs or small trees may be found, and sometimes beside a watercourse,
where a stream runs during the rains, the eye is refreshed by a few
slender willows; but speaking generally, this huge desert, one-third of
South Africa, contains nothing but low bushes, few of which are fit even
for fuel. Farther east, where the rainfall is heavier, the trees, though
still small, are more frequent and less thorny. Parts of the great plain
round Kimberley were tolerably well wooded thirty years ago, but the
trees have all been cut down to make mine props or for fire-wood. North
of Mafeking the rolling flats and low hills of Bechuanaland are pretty
fairly wooded, and so to a less degree are the adjoining parts of the
Transvaal and Matabililand. The road going north from Mafeking passes
through some three hundred miles of such woodlands, but a less beautiful
or interesting woodland I have never seen. The trees are mostly the
thorny mimosas I have mentioned. None exceed thirty, few reach
twenty-five, feet. Though they grow loosely scattered, the space between
them is eithe