f nearly 6000 feet. A remarkable feature of most of these hills,
as of many all over the plateau, is that they are flat-topped, and have
often steep, even craggy escarpments. This seems due to the fact that
the strata (chiefly sandstone) are horizontal; and very often a bed of
hard igneous rock, some, kind of trap or greenstone, or porphyry,
protects the summit of the hill from the disintegrating influences of
the weather. It is a bare land, with very little wood, and that small
and scrubby, but is well covered with herbage, affording excellent
pasture during two-thirds of the year. After the first rains, when these
wide stretches of gently undulating land are dressed in their new
vesture of brilliant green, nothing can be imagined more exhilarating
than a ride across the wide expanse; for the air is pure, keen, and
bracing, much like that of the high prairies of Colorado or Wyoming.
There are fortunately no blizzards, but violent thunderstorms are not
uncommon, and the hailstones--I have seen them as big as bantams'
eggs--which fall during such storms sometimes kill the smaller animals,
and even men. Dry as the land appears to the eye during the winter, the
larger streams do not wholly fail, and water can generally be got. The
south-eastern part of the Free State, especially along the Caledon
River, is extremely fertile, one of the best corn-growing parts of
Africa. The rest is fitter for pasture than for tillage, except, of
course, on the alluvial banks of the rivers, and nearly the whole region
is in fact occupied by huge grazing farms. As such a farm needs and
supports only a few men, the population grows but slowly. The Free State
is nearly as big as England and just as big as the State of New York;
but it has only 77,000 white inhabitants and about 130,000 natives.

THE SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC

Somewhat larger,--about as large as Great Britain and nearly two-thirds
the size of France--is the South African Republic, which we commonly
talk of as the Transvaal. Of its white population, which numbers some
170,000, two-thirds are in the small mining district of the
Witwatersrand. All the Transvaal, except a strip on the eastern and
another strip on the northern border along the river Limpopo, also
belongs to the great plateau and exhibits the characteristic features of
the plateau. The hills are, however, higher than in the Free State, and
along the east, where the Quathlamba Range forms the outer edge of the
plateau