by different minds. There are many who find the presence of what
Homer calls "the rich works of men" essential to the perfection of a
landscape. Cultivated fields, gardens, and orchards, farmhouses dotted
here and there, indications in one form or another of human life and
labour, do not merely give a greater variety to every prospect, but also
impart an element which evokes the sense of sympathy with our
fellow-beings, and excites a whole group of emotions which the
contemplation of nature, taken by itself, does not arouse. No one is
insensible to these things and some find little delight in any scene
from which they are absent. Yet there are other minds to which there is
something specially solemn and impressive in the untouched and primitive
simplicity of a country which stands now just as it came from the hands
of the Creator. The self-sufficingness of nature, the insignificance of
man, the mystery of a universe which does not exist, as our ancestors
fondly thought, for the sake of man, but for other purposes hidden from
us and for ever undiscoverable--these things are more fully realised and
more deeply felt when one traverses a boundless wilderness which seems
to have known no change since the remote ages when hill and plain and
valley were moulded into the forms we see to-day. Feelings of this kind
powerfully affect the mind of the traveller in South Africa. They affect
him in the Karroo, where the slender line of rails, along which his
train creeps all day and all night across wide stretches of brown desert
and under the crests of stern dark hills, seems to heighten by contrast
the sense of solitude--a vast and barren solitude interposed between the
busy haunts of men which he has left behind on the shores of the ocean
and those still busier haunts whither he is bent, where the pick and
hammer sound upon the Witwatersrand, and the palpitating engine drags
masses of ore from the depths of the crowded mine. They affect him still
more in the breezy highlands of Matabililand, where the eye ranges over
an apparently endless succession of undulations clothed with tall grass
or waving wood, till they sink in the blue distance toward the plain
through which the great Zambesi takes its seaward course.

The wilderness is indeed not wholly unpeopled. Over the wide surface of
Matabililand and Mashonaland--an area of some two hundred thousand
square miles--there are scattered natives of various tribes, whose
numbers have been