s come close to the shore--the only place, therefore,
except the harbour of St. John's far to the east, where there is
anything that can be called grand coast scenery. As one travels inland
the hills become constantly higher, till at a distance of thirty or
forty miles from the sea they have reached an average height of from
3000 to 4000 feet, and sixty miles from 5000 to 6000 feet. These hills,
intersected by valleys which grow narrower and have steeper sides the
farther inland one goes, are the spurs or outer declivity of a long
range of mountains which runs all the way from Cape Town to the Zambesi
Valley, a distance of sixteen hundred miles, and is now usually called
by geographers (for it has really no general name) the Drakensberg or
Quathlamba Range. Their height varies from 3000 to 7000 feet, some of
the highest lying not far to the north-east of Cape Town. In one region,
however, several summits reach to 11,000 feet. This is Basutoland, the
country that lies at the corner where Cape Colony, Natal, and the Orange
Free State meet. It is a region remarkable in several respects, for its
scenery as well as for its history, and for the condition of the native
race that inhabits it, and I shall have to give some account of it in a
later chapter. These mountains of Basutoland are the loftiest in Africa
south of Kilimandjaro, and keep snow on their summits for several months
in the year.

Behind the Quathlamba Range the country spreads out to the north and
west in a vast tableland, sometimes flat, sometimes undulating,
sometimes intersected by ridges of rocky hills. This is the third
region. Its average height above the sea varies from 3000 to 5000 feet,
and the hills reach in places nearly 6000. Thus the Quathlamba Range may
be regarded as being really the edge of the tableland, and when in
travelling up from the coast one reaches the water-shed, or "divide" (an
American term which South Africans have adopted), one finds that on the
farther or northerly side there is very little descent. The peaks which
when seen from the slopes towards the coast looked high and steep are on
this inner side insignificant, because they rise so little above the
general level of the plateau. This plateau runs away inland to the west
and north-west, and occupies seven-eighths of the surface of South
Africa. It dips gently on the north to the valley of the Zambesi; but on
the west spreads out over the Kalahari Desert and the scarcely less ar