greedily
on the same pasture, had been killed or driven away by the keen hunting
of the years that followed the taking of the Cape by the English.1
Sometimes
the clear sky of the horizon was blurred by the advancing of monstrous
swarms of locusts, the "black snowstorms " of the natives, sweeping
over the face of the land like the scourge of devouring flames, chased
by myriads of locust birds, and coating the ground for miles around at
nightfall with a crawling, heaving coverlet. Then might be heard the
hoarse trump of the cranes winging their way over the desert and
dropping on the field strewn with locusts to gorge on their insect
prey. Or the travellers saw the slate-white secretary bird stalking
about with his self-satisfied strut and scraping up mouthfuls with his
eagle-like bill.
More
marvellous than the locust clouds were the amazing mirages that
deceived even the keen-eyed ostriches with their counterfeit lakes and
wood-fringed streams, so temptingly near, but so provokingly receding,
like the fruits hanging over the thirsting Tantalus. Sometimes hilltops
were reared high above the horizon, distorted to mountainous size and
melting suddenly in thin air or a flying blur. Now a solitary horseman
was seen to swoop over the desert in the form of a mammoth bird, or a
troop of antelopes were changed to charging cavalry. No trick of
illusion and transformation was beyond the conjuring power of the
flickering atmosphere charged with the radiating heat of the desert.2
When the prospectors crossed the karroo and entered the
1 "A Breath from the Veld," John Guille Millais, London, 1895.
2
Despatches of Julian Ralph and other special correspondents to London
journals, October—December, 1899. "Sketches and Studies in South
Africa," W. J. K. Little, London, 1899. "Portraits of the Game and Wild
Animals of Southern Africa," W. G. Harris, London, 1840. "The Large
Game and Natural History of South and Southeast Africa," W. H.
Drummond, Edinburgh, 1875. "Travel and Adventure in Southeast Africa,"
F. C. Selous, London, 1893. " Kloof and Karroo," H. A. Bryden, London,
1889. "Days and Nights by the Desert," P. Gillmore, London, 1888. "Gun
and Camera in South Africa," H. A. Bryden, London, 1893.
