either side
the sky was pale green-blue, translucent and pure, deep as infinity
itself. The earth was still black, and the top of the rise near at hand
was clear edged. On that edge, and by a strange chance accurately in
the centre of illumination, stood the uncouth massive form of a shaggy
wildebeeste, his head raised, staring to the east. He did not move;
nothing of that fire and black world moved; only instant by instant it
changed, swelling in glory toward some climax until one expected at any
moment a fanfare of trumpets, the burst of triumphant culmination.

Then very far down in the distance a lion roared. The wildebeeste,
without moving, bellowed back an answer or a defiance. Down in the
hollow an ostrich boomed. Zebra barked, and several birds chirped
strongly. The tension was breaking not in the expected fanfare and burst
of triumphal music, but in a manner instantly felt to be more fitting
to what was indeed a wonder, but a daily wonder for all that. At one and
the same instant the rim of the sun appeared and the wildebeeste, after
the sudden habit of his kind, made up his mind to go. He dropped his
head and came thundering down past us at full speed. Straight to the
west he headed, and so disappeared. We could hear the beat of his hoofs
dying into the distance. He had gone like a Warder of the Morning whose
task was finished. On the knife-edged skyline appeared the silhouette of
slim-legged little Tommies, flirting their rails, sniffing at the
dewy grass, dainty, slender, confiding, the open-day antithesis of the
tremendous and awesome lord of the darkness that had roared its way to
its lair, and to the massive shaggy herald of morning that had thundered
down to the west.

III. THE CENTRAL PLATEAU

Now is required a special quality of the imagination, not in myself, but
in my readers, for it becomes necessary for them to grasp the logic of
a whole country in one mental effort. The difficulties to me are very
real. If I am to tell you it all in detail, your mind becomes confused
to the point of mingling the ingredients of the description. The
resultant mental picture is a composite; it mixes localities wide
apart; it comes out, like the snake-creeper-swamp-forest thing of
grammar-school South America, an unreal and deceitful impression. If,
on the other hand, I try to give you a bird's-eye view-saying, here
is plain, and there follows upland, and yonder succeed mountains and
hills-you lose the sense