reason why many
English rivers which were navigable in the tenth century (because we
know that the Northmen traversed them in vessels which had crossed the
German Ocean) but are now too shallow to let a row-boat pass, is to be
found in the destruction of the forests and the draining of the marshes
which the forests sheltered.]

CHAPTER V

PHYSICAL ASPECTS OF THE VARIOUS POLITICAL DIVISIONS

Hitherto I have spoken of South Africa as a natural whole, ignoring its
artificial division into Colonies and States. It may be well to complete
the account of the physical characteristics of the country by giving the
reader some notion of the aspects of each of the political divisions,
and thereby a notion also of their relative importance and resources as
wealth-producing regions.

CAPE COLONY

Cape Colony is a huge territory more than twice as large as the United
Kingdom. But very little of it is available for tillage, and much of it
is too arid even for stock-keeping. The population, including natives,
is only seven to the square mile. Nearly the whole of it is high
country. All along its westerly coast and its southerly coast there is a
strip of low ground bordering the ocean, which in some places is but a
mile or two wide, and in others, where a broad valley opens spreads
backward, giving thirty or forty square miles of tolerably level or
undulating ground. The rich wine and corn district round Stellenbosch
and Paarl and northward towards Malmesbury is such a tract. Behind this
low strip the country rises, sometimes in steep acclivities, up which a
road or railway has to be carried in curves and zigzags, sometimes in
successive terraces, the steps, so to speak, by which the lofty interior
breaks down towards the sea.

Behind these terraces and slopes lies the great tableland described in a
preceding chapter. Though I call it a tableland, it is by no means flat,
for several long, though not lofty, ranges of hills, mostly running east
and west, intersect it. Some tracts are only 2000 feet, others as much
as 5000 feet, above the sea, while the highest hilltops approach 8000
feet. The part of this high country which lies between longitude 20 deg. and
25 deg. E., with the Nieuweld and Sneeuwberg mountains to the north of it,
and the Zwarte Berg to the south, is called the Great Karroo. (The word
is Hottentot, and means a dry or bare place.) It is tolerably level,
excessively dry, with no such thing as a running stre