SOUTH AFRICAN VELDT.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14133, 7 August 1909, Page 4 (Supplement)

SOUTH AFRICAN VELDT.

AS SEEN FROM THE TRAIN. - The way to come upon the veldt, so as to acquire an impression that no after experience can efface, is to. land at Capetown and; take the night train up country. It used to leave the city at eight o'clock in the evening, sliding out under the loom ot Table Mountain through little leafy suburbs, whence the raw, clean smell of aloes reached one from the gardens of the houses, and 60 out to the vineyards of Wynberg and into the mountains of Paarl. The heavy gradients would be mounting by the time one turned in to sleep; there might be a view of moonlight shining over abrupt kopjes sharply truncated, miles upon miles of miniature Table Mountains. And next would come the waking, in the keen chill of dawn, at a tiny, lonely- station, where hot coffee was to be had.

No . mountains now in the t night the earth had flattened; from horizon to horizon it lay like a sluggish sea, and across it the railway sliced without a curve. The grass upon it was sparse and uneven, broken by small bushes standing no more than knee-high and scattered' among boulders. From sky to sky, is far as one could see, there was no glimpse of a roof, no token of human life; the world was empty and voiceless. The sky spanned it with clear grey, save that in the east there warmed and reddened a rose-and-bronze fore-know-ledge of sunrise, and overhead, poised and motionless in that mighty profundity of air and stillness, a single vulture reconnoitred the earth. In the middle of all, ringed round by a world at gaze, the train, the station, one's self, stood like assertive insects, a fussy offence upon the splendour of that brooding vacancy. ,

'This," you would be told, as the poignant air stung your lungs and waked your blood to buoyancy, " this is the Karoo. And thereafter you would not forget it.

But the Karoo, for all its quality, does not account for the veldt. The veldt has its variety, and everywhere its local character, always to be identified, but in no way detracting ,from those things in it which are everywhere the same. At Queenstown it is broken by kopjes, rising sharply out of it like bold islands; across the Orange River, it runs north in long, easy undulations, like the swell of an ocean before a trade wind; beyond Pretoria, it breaks into bush-veldt, thicketed with mimosa and Wacht-een-bectjo bushes, bristling with 2in curved thorns. Across the Limpopo, it changes face again trees come into evidence, and to the westward there are forests. - . '

And then, north of Salisbury, there lies the heavy, grey-green veldt of the tropics, where the . grass stands six : feet - high and more in its season, till it slopes down to the shifting banks of the Zambesi. And these are but few ,of its manifestations; I have not- spoken of Natal and its palms and snakes and monkeys, nor of the Kalahari Desert, where one hears still of bushmen. It adjusts itself to each contour of ; and and each phase of climate, but its name and its salient <»quality do not alter. It never loses its superb effects of space, its surge across uneven miles, to a. sharp, remote skyline. It gives one room to go at large, room to use one's eyes, an arena for one's strength. And whether it be the veldt of Natal, speckled with the scarlet plumes of flowering aloes, or of Rhodesia under a day-long vehemence of sun, it preserves as an • undernotc a mild and even tone of grey. Even on the Natal coast, where vegetation riots into luxuriance and asserts a certain stridency of colour, there •is present that quiet. and infinitely restful background of greys and indeterminate greens, and in landscapes one sees at a distance one notes how even the Vividness of claret-leaved palms merges itself into and blends' with that governing and general colourlessness.