les west of the Caledon, stands out a series of high, detached
hills, which form a covered way along the eastern boundary of the Free
State, crossing the Orange, and leading into the recesses of the
Stormberg Mountains.

[Sidenote: Natal features.]

For every wavelet of land upon the surface of the Boer States, a
hundred great billows stand up in Natal. Kopje succeeds kopje, all
steep, and many precipitous, yet not the bare, stony cairns of the
transmontane regions, but moist green masses of verdure, seldom
parched even in the dry season, and in the wet, glistening with a
thousand cascades; not severely conical or rectangular, like the
bizarre eminences which cover Cape Colony with the models of a school
of geometry, but nobly outlined. Many of the foothills, it is true,
are mere heaps of rock and stone; but even these are rarely such naked
and uncompromising piles as are found on the higher levels. Even where
northern Natal occasionally widens and subsides to a savannah, as it
does below the Biggarsberg, and again south of Colenso, the expanse,
compared with the tremendous stretches of the Boer veld, is but a
meadow.

[Sidenote: Healthy theatre sole favour for invader.]

As a theatre of war South Africa had one advantage, that it was for
the most part eminently healthy. Enteric fever, the scourge of armies,
was bound to be prevalent amongst thousands exposed to hardships in a
country where the water supply was indifferent, where sanitation was
usually primitive amongst the inhabitants, and impossible to improvise
hurriedly. But the purity of the air, the geniality of the
temperature, the cool nights, the brilliant sunshine, and the hard dry
soil were palliatives of evils inseparable from all campaigning.
Otherwise, for regular armies of invasion, South Africa was
unfavourable. The railways were so few that the business of supply and
movement was always arduous; spaces so vast that large forces were
swallowed up; the enormous distances from one strategical point to
another, intensified, in difficulty by the almost entire absence of
good roads, the scarcity of substantial bridges, of well-built towns,
of commodious harbours, and of even such ordinary necessaries as flour
or fuel, all these complicated every military problem to a degree not
readily intelligible to the student of European warfare alone.

[Sidenote: The central plateau.]

It is not easy to sum up briefly the typical qualities as a fighting
area of a