instinct, had quickly discovered that Carew's mind was a well of
knowledge on most things Rhodesian. So the taciturn soldier joined the
cavalcade, though he succeeded in attaching himself to Mr. Pym and
riding well on ahead.

The two Macaulays were "small miners," working on tribute a mine
belonging to a block owned by a company in which Henry Pym had large
interests. Complaints had come through to his ears concerning the
difficult conditions upon which the two young miners, and many others
like them, struggled to make a fortune or a livelihood, and he had a
fancy to go and see them for himself. The mine was in a hollow, banked
round by tall, gloomy kopjes, which seemed to stand like a bodyguard,
sternly shutting them off from all sight or sound of the outside
world. At the same time, the road to it was delightful. Sometimes they
climbed nearly to the top of a kopje, the mules going up stairways of
granite as if born to it, and the lovely country lay outspread in a
glorious panorama before them.

The party said very little, but their eyes told that the fascination
had crept into their hearts already, though they could only appreciate
in silence, wondering, perhaps, why they felt this strong attraction
for a land that was chiefly kopjes and veldt.

Was it, perhaps, the marvellous, translucent atmosphere, or was it the
blue intensity of the dreaming kopjes, ornamented ever and anon by
gleaming white battlements of granite, where the sun blazed down on
giant boulders, or was it the unfathomable, mysterious, syren-like
allurement of the country, that, without effort, without thought,
steeped the senses in an irresistible fascination? Why does Rhodesia
fascinate? Why does she call men back again and again to her manifold
discomforts and unnerving disappointments, to her pests and glare, to
her bully beef and unwashed Kaffirs? Who shall say?... Who shall
attempt to explain?...

There is no explanation; only the foolish would seek it. The country
just gets up and takes hold of one and smiles, and men become enslaved
to her. Ever after "the hazy blue of her mountains, the waft of the
veldt-born scent," is like a germ in the blood. The discomforts are
forgotten, the disappointments dissolve into air, the noontide glare
and choking dust are a mere nothing: libellous creations of some
discontented grumbler. And in the midst of the crowd, or in England's
green lanes, or on some far shore, the wanderer is caught in the old
mesh