bungalow--and there is nothing else of Stormberg but veldt and, kopje,
wind and sky. Only these last day's there has sprung up a little patch
of white tents a quarter of a mile from the station, and about them move
men in putties and khaki. Signal flags blink from the rises, pickets
with fixed bayonets dot the ridges, mounted men in couples patrol the
plain and the dip and the slope. Four companies of the Berkshire
Regiment and the mounted infantry section--in all they may count 400
men. Fifty miles north is the Orange river, and beyond it, maybe by now
this side of it, thousands of armed and mounted burghers--and war.

I wonder if it is all real? By the clock I have been travelling
something over forty hours in South Africa, but it might just as well be
a minute or a lifetime. It is a minute of experience prolonged to a
lifetime. South Africa is a dream--one of those dreams in which you live
years in the instant of waking--a dream of distance.

Departing from Capetown by night, I awoke in the Karroo. Between nine
and six in the morning we had made less than a hundred and eighty miles.
Now we were climbing the vast desert of the Karroo, the dusty stairway
that leads on to the highlands of South Africa. Once you have seen one
desert, all the others are like it; and yet once you have loved the
desert, each is lovable in a new way. In the Karroo you seem to be
going up a winding ascent, like the ramps that lead to an Indian
fortress. You are ever pulling up an incline between hills, making for a
corner round one of the ranges. You feel that when you get round that
corner you will at last see something: you arrive and only see another
incline, two more ranges, and another corner--surely this time with
something to arrive at beyond. You arrive and arrive, and once more you
arrive--and once more you see the same vast nothing you are coming from.
Believe it or not, that is the very charm of a desert--the unfenced
emptiness, the space, the freedom, the unbroken arch of the sky. It is
for ever fooling you, and yet you for ever pursue it. And then it is
only to the eye that cannot do without green that the Karroo is
unbeautiful. Every other colour meets others in harmony--tawny sand,
silver-grey scrub, crimson-tufted flowers like heather, black ribs of
rock, puce shoots of screes, violet mountains in the middle distance,
blue fairy battlements guarding the horizon. And above all broods the
intense purity of the South African azur