tly with no bad effects. Below Palla, one hundred
and ninety-five miles north of Mafeking, the Notwani joins the Limpopo,
or Crocodile River, a much larger stream, which has come down from the
Transvaal hills, and winds for nearly a thousand miles to the north and
east before it falls into the Indian Ocean. It is here nearly as wide as
the Thames at Henley, fordable in some places, and flowing very gently.
The country all along this part of the road is perfectly flat, and just
after the wet season very feverish, but it may be traversed with
impunity from the end of May till December. It is a dull
region--everywhere the same thin wood, through which one can see for
about a quarter of a mile in every direction, consisting of two or three
kinds of mimosa, all thorny, and all so spare and starved in their
leafage that one gets little shade beneath them when at the midday halt
shelter has to be sought from the formidable sun. On the parched ground
there is an undergrowth of prickly shrubs, among which it is necessary
to move with as much care as is needed in climbing a barbed-wire fence.
When at night, camping out on the veldt, one gathers brushwood to light
the cooking-fire, both the clothes and the hands of the novice come
badly off. Huge ant-hills begin to appear, sometimes fifteen to twenty
feet high and as many yards in circumference; but these large ones are
all dead and may be of considerable age. In some places they are so high
and steep, and stand so close together, that by joining them with an
earthen rampart a strong fort might be made. When people begin to till
the ground more largely than the natives now do, the soil heaped up in
these great mounds will be found most serviceable. It consists of good
mould, very friable, and when spread out over the service ought to prove
fertile. In pulverizing the soil, the ants render here much the same
kind of service which the earthworms do in Europe. There are no flowers
at this season (end of September), and very little grass; yet men say
that there is no better ranching country in all South Africa, and the
oxen which one meets all the way, feeding round the spots where the
transport-waggons have halted, evidently manage to pick up enough
herbage to support them. The number of ox-waggons is surprising in so
lonely a country, till one remembers that most of the food and drink, as
well as of the furniture, agricultural and mining tools, and wood for
building,--indeed, most of