a stick emit different notes, the
first beginnings of a tune. A very few were reading or writing letters,
the rest busy with their cooking or talking to one another. Some tribes
are incessant talkers, and in this strange mixing-pot of black men one
may hear a dozen languages spoken as one passes from group to group.

The climate of Kimberley is healthy, and even bracing, though not
pleasant when a north-west wind from the Kalahari Desert fills the air
with sand and dust. Its dryness recommends it as a resort for
consumptive patients, while the existence of a cultivated, though small,
society, makes it a less doleful place of residence than are the
sanatoria of the Karroo. The country round is, however, far from
attractive. Save on the east, where there rises a line of hills just
high enough to catch the lovely lights of evening and give colour and
variety to the landscape, the prospect is monotonous in every direction.
Like the ocean, this vast plain is so flat that you cannot see how vast
it is. Except in the environs of the town, it is unbroken by tree or
house, and in a part of those environs the masses of bluish-grey mine
refuse that strew the ground give a dismal and even squalid air to the
foreground of the view. One is reminded of the deserted coal-pits that
surround Wigan, or the burnt-out and waste parts of the Black Country in
South Staffordshire, though at Kimberley there is, happily, no
coal-smoke or sulphurous fumes in the air, no cinder on the surface, no
coal-dust to thicken the mud and blacken the roads. Some squalor one
must have with that disturbance of nature which mining involves, but
here the enlightened activity of the Company and the settlers has done
its best to mitigate these evils by the planting of trees and orchards,
by the taste which many of the private houses show, and by the provision
here and there of open spaces for games.

From Kimberley the newly-opened railway runs one hundred and fifty miles
farther north to Vryburg, till lately the capital of the Crown Colony of
British Bechuanaland, annexed in 1895 to Cape Colony, and thence to
Mafeking. After a few miles the line crosses the Vaal River, here a
respectable stream for South Africa, since it has, even in the dry
season, more water than the Cam at Cambridge, or the Cherwell at
Oxford--perhaps as much as the Arno at Florence. It flows in a wide,
rocky bed, about thirty feet below the level of the adjoining country.
The country become