flowers. Hardly an herb, and not a
blade of grass, is to be seen on the ground, which is sometimes of clay,
baked hard by the sun, sometimes of sand, without a drop of water
anywhere. Yet water flows when, now and then in the summer, a storm
breaks, or a few showers come; and then nature revives, and for a week
or two flowers spring from the soil and a fresher green comes upon the
bushes. In a landscape so arid one hears with surprise that the land is
worth ten shillings an acre for one or two of the smallest shrubs give
feed for sheep, and there are wells scattered about sufficient for the
flocks. The farms are large, usually of at least six thousand acres, so
one seldom sees a farmhouse. The farmers are all of Boer stock. They
lead a lonely life in a silent and melancholy nature, but their habitual
gravity has not made them unsocial, for they are fond of riding or
driving in their waggons to visit one another on all occasions of
festivity or mourning. Every ten or fifteen miles there is a station,
and here the British element in the population appears, chiefly occupied
in store-keeping. At Matjesfontein one finds an hotel and a number of
small villas built to serve as a health resort. Wells surrounded by
Australian gums planted for shade, make a little oasis in the desert.
Farther east the village of Beaufort West, the only place along the line
that aspires to be called a town, boasts a church with a spire, and has
one or two streets, though most of its houses are stuck down irregularly
over a surface covered with broken bottles and empty sardine and
preserved meat tins. Here, too, there is a large, shallow pond of water,
and here people with weak lungs come to breathe the keen, dry,
invigorating air. Of its efficacy there is no doubt, but one would think
that the want of society and of variety would be almost as depressing as
the air is stimulating. The prospects have a certain beauty, for beyond
the wide, bare, greyish-brown plain to the south sharp mountains stand
up, which take at sunrise and sunset delightful tints of blue and
purple, and the sense of a vast expanse on earth beneath and in heaven
above has something strange and solemn. But the monotony of perpetual
sunlight upon a landscape which has no foregrounds and never changes,
save in colour, must be trying to those who have no occupation except
that of getting well.

This Karroo scenery continues, with little variation, for hundreds of
miles. To the nort