y poisoned foot. The white residues
gleamed beneath the moon, from every smoke stack poured smoke: the
dragon breathed. Then the great white cyanide tanks were like bosses on
the beast; the train stopped, and the battery roared. That night, for it
was a silent and windless night, I heard forty miles of batteries
beating on the beach of my mind like a great sea. And men laboured in
the bowels of the earth for gold. But out upon the veldt it was very
quiet, "quietly shining to the quiet moon." I understood then that it
was no wonder if the simple and stolid Dutchman had a peculiar
abhorrence for a town, which, even at night, was never at rest. In
Johannesburg is neither rest, nor peace, nor any school for nobility of
thought; it destroys the pleasures of the simple, and satisfies not the
desires of those whose simplicity is their least striking feature.

Upon the veldt and the Karroo, and even through the Mapani scrub country
that lies north of Lobatsi, simplicity is the chief characteristic of
the scenery. As I went by Victoria West (I had spent the night talking
politics with the civillest Dutchmen) I came in early morning to the
first Karroo I had seen. The air was tonic, like an exhilarating wine
with some wonderful elixir in it other than alcohol, and though the
country reminded me in places of vast plains in New South Wales, it
lacked, or seemed to lack, the perpetual brooding melancholy that
invests the great Austral island. As I stood on the platform of the car,
the sun, not yet risen, gilded level clouds. The light reddened and the
gold died: and the sudden sun sparkled like a big star, and heaved a
round shoulder up between two of Africa's flat-topped hills, which were
yet blue in the far distance. Then the level light of earliest day
poured across the plateau, yellow with thin grass, which began to ask
for rain. The picture left upon my mind is without detail, and made up
of broad masses. Even a railway station, with some few gum trees, and
the pinky cloud of peach blossom about the little house, was
excellently simple and homely. A distant farm, with smoke rising beneath
the shadow of a little kopje, a band of emerald green, where irrigation
sent its flow of water, a thousand sheep with a blanketed Kaffir minding
them, filled the eye with satisfaction.

Out of such a country should come simple lives. By the sport of fate the
cruellest complexity of politics is to be found there.

And yet who can declare that