arcation, but she has provided such scanty means of sustenance for
human life and so few openings for human industry unaided by capital,
that the settlers (save where capital has come to their aid) remain few
indeed, and one may call the interior of South Africa a vast solitude,
with a few oases of population dotted here and there over it.

CHAPTER VII

ASPECTS OF SCENERY

The sketch I have given of the physical character of South Africa will
doubtless have conveyed to the reader that the country offers
comparatively little to attract the lover of natural scenery. This
impression is true if the sort of landscape we have learned to enjoy in
Europe and in the eastern part of the United States be taken as the type
of scenery which gives most pleasure. Variety of form, boldness of
outline, the presence of water in lakes and running streams, and, above
all, foliage and verdure, are the main elements of beauty in those
landscapes; while if any one desires something of more imposing
grandeur, he finds it in snow-capped mountains like the Alps or the
Cascade Range, or in majestic crags such as those which tower over the
fiords of Norway. But the scenery of South Africa is wholly unlike that
of Europe or of most parts of America. It is, above all things, a dry
land, a parched and thirsty land, where no clear brooks murmur through
the meadow, no cascade sparkles from the cliff, where mountain and plain
alike are brown and dusty except during the short season of the rains.
And being a dry land, it is also a bare land. Few are the favoured spots
in which a veritable forest can be seen; for though many tracts are
wooded, the trees are almost always thin and stunted. In Matabililand,
for instance, though a great part of the surface is covered with wood,
you see no trees forty feet high, and few reaching thirty; while in the
wilderness of the Kalahari Desert and Damaraland nothing larger than a
bush is visible, except the scraggy and thorny mimosa.

These features of South Africa--the want of water and the want of
greenness--are those to which a native of Western Europe finds it
hardest to accustom himself, however thoroughly he may enjoy the
brilliant sun and the keen dry air which go along with them. And it must
also be admitted that over very large areas the aspects of nature are so
uniform as to become monotonous. One may travel eight hundred miles and
see less variety in the landscape than one would find in one-fourth