y, an unutterably weary, day in a coach
upon the Transvaal uplands, and came in the dark to the house of a Boer
who served travellers with unspeakable food and gave them such
accommodation as might be. It was midnight when I arrived, and all his
beds were full of those who were journeying in the opposite direction.
He made me a couch on the floor in a kind of lumber-room, and, softened
child of civilisation that I had become, I growled by myself at what he
gave, and wondered what, in the name of the devil who wanders over the
earth, I was doing there. And how could he endure it? How, indeed. I
fell asleep, and the next minute, which was six hours later, I awoke,
and stumbled with a dusty mouth into the remaining night, not yet become
dawn. Such an hour seemed unpropitious. My bones ached; I lamented my
ancient hardness in the time when a board or a sheet of stringy bark was
soft; I felt a touch of fever, my throat was dry, a hard hot day of
discomfort was before me. In the dim dusk I saw the mules gathered by
the coach, which had yet to do sixty miles. A bucket invited me; I
washed my hot hands and face, and walked away from the buildings into
the open. Then very suddenly and without any warning I understood why
the Boer existed, and why, in his absurd perversity, he rather
preferred existing as he was; and I saw that even I, like other
Englishmen, could be subdued to the veldt. The air was crisp and chill;
the dawn began to break in a pale olive band in the lower east; the
stars were bright overhead; the morning star was even yet resplendent.
But these things I had seen on the southern Karroo. It was not my eyes
alone that told me the old secret, the same old secret that I had known.
I knew then, and at once, as an infinite peace poured over me, that all
my senses were required to bring me back to nature, and that one alone
was helpless. Now with what I saw came what I heard. I heard the clatter
of harness, the jingle of a bell, the low of a cow, the trampling of the
mules. And I smelt with rapture, with delight, the complex odours of the
farm that sat so solitary in the world; but above all the chill moving
odour of the great plain itself. This, or these, made a strange,
primitive pleasure that I had known in Australia, in Texas, even in a
farm upon the edge of a wild Westmorland moor. My senses informed my
intellect. I shook hands with the creatures of the veldt, for I was of
their tribe. Even my feet trod the earth po