nental plateau descends suddenly northwards to the Zambesi,
and eastwards to Portuguese territory, _i.e._, on the northern and
eastern frontiers of Mashonaland. Almost at the junction of these
boundaries it is joined by the Matoppo Hills, which rise from the
north-eastern limits of Khama's Country, bisect obliquely the region
between the Zambesi and the Limpopo, and culminate in Mount Hampden
(5,000 feet), near Salisbury.

[Sidenote: Rivers Limpopo and Orange.]

[Sidenote: The water-parting.]

Passing from the mountains to the great plateau they enclose, the
first point to be noted is that its surface is set at two opposite
"tilts," the portion north of the Witwaters Rand inclining downward to
the east, the other, south of that ridge, to the west. The drainage,
therefore, runs respectively east and west, and it is effected by the
two great streams of the Limpopo and the Orange, with their many
affluents. The general river system of the central plains is thus of
the simplest; the Indian Ocean receives their northern waters, the
Atlantic their southern; the remarkable factor of the arrangement
being that a physical feature so insignificant as the Witwaters Rand
should perform the function of water-parting for a region so
gigantic.[64]

[Footnote 64: There are, of course, in South Africa numerous
minor and local watersheds (_e.g._, the Drakensberg, where
they initiate the drainage of Natal in an easterly direction,
and the mountains of southern Cape Colony, which send some of
her rivers southward to the Indian Ocean). These have been
necessarily almost disregarded in so general a survey of the
sub-continent as that aimed at in the present chapter.]

[Sidenote: Course of Limpopo.]

The Limpopo, or Crocodile river, rises as a paltry stream in the
Witwaters Rand between Johannesburg and Pretoria, and flows into the
Indian Ocean, 80 miles north of Delagoa Bay, covering in its course
fully 1,350 miles.

[Sidenote: Course of Orange.]

The Orange has three distinct sets of headstreams from the western
flank of the Drakensberg, and a total length of 1,300 miles. From the
Basuto border to Ramah, on the Kimberley railway, about 220 miles, it
divided the Orange Free State from Cape Colony. The Orange receives on
its right bank its greatest affluent, the Vaal, which is between 500
and 600 miles in length. Commercially, both the Orange and the Vaal
are as useless