"

Northward from Mafeking the country grows pretty. At first there are
trees scattered picturesquely over the undulating pastures and sometimes
forming woods--dry and open woods, yet welcome after the bareness which
one has left behind. Here we passed the tiny group of houses called
Pitsani, little dreaming that three months later it would become famous
as the place where the Matabililand police were marshalled, and from
which they started on their ill-starred march into the Transvaal, whose
bare and forbidding hills we saw a few miles away to the east. Presently
the ground becomes rougher, and the track winds among and under a
succession of abrupt kopjes (pronounced "koppies"), mostly of granitic
or gneissose rock. One is surprised that a heavy coach, and still
heavier waggons, can so easily traverse such a country, for the road is
only a track, for which art has done nothing save in cutting a way
through the trees. It is one of the curious features of South Africa
that the rocky hills have an unusual faculty for standing detached
enough from one another to allow wheeled vehicles to pass between them,
and the country is so dry that morasses, the obstacle which a driver
chiefly fears in most countries, are here, for three-fourths of the
year, not feared at all. This region of bold, craggy hills, sparsely
wooded, usually rising only some few hundred feet out of the plateau
itself, which is about 4000 feet above the sea, continues for about
thirty miles. To it there succeeds a long stretch of flat land along the
banks of the sluggish Notwani, the only perennial river of these parts;
for the stream which on the map bears the name of Molopo, and runs away
west into the desert to lose nearly all of its water in the sands, is in
September dry, and one crosses its channel without noticing it. This
Notwani, whose course is marked by a line of trees taller and greener
than the rest, is at this season no better than a feeble brook, flowing
slowly, with more mud than water. But it contains not only good-sized
fish, the catching of which is the chief holiday diversion of these
parts, but also crocodiles, which, generally dormant during the season
of low water, are apt to obtrude themselves when they are least
expected, and would make bathing dangerous, were there any temptation to
bathe in such a thick green fluid. That men as well as cattle should
drink it seems surprising, yet they do,--Europeans as well as
natives,--and apparen