The character of the country in its different stages is well given in the illustrations. There are no striking features; no mountains, no large river, except the Zambesi, and only one rather uninteresting lake, ’Ngami; no great forests, no tropical vegetation; the rains are scanty, the soil dry, the plains large. What you see one day you may see for a week. In most countries you would have to describe nature in her many phases, but in South Africa one might take a paint-brush and give a broad, general idea of the land, with four or five streaks of colour--the widely extending, ascending, nearly treeless flats from Kuruman to the Molopo River; the broken, fairly clothed region of the Bakatla; and the open park-like scenery between them and the rocky homes of the Bakaa and Ba-Mungwato. Throughout this area the prevailing trees are mimosas; the flowers are of the same genera and orders, undisturbed by man--sheets of different kinds are often spread out side by side, parterre fashion, in separate beds, not mingling even at the edges. They have fought the battle out amongst themselves, and it has ended in the survival of the fittest, aliens less suited to the particular border being crowded out by the stronger natives. From the Ba-Mungwato, however, as you dive into the Kalahari desert by the Bushmen sucking-holes of ’Serotli, thirty yards of sand suffice to change the growth and families of trees and flowers. On the side we struck the hollow, they were old friends; on the other, entire strangers--not even recognised by the Kafirs who had accompanied us from the south. We had turned over a fresh leaf in Nature’s book, and it lasted us until the sluggish waters of the Zouga River and Lake Kamadou came in sight, with their lonely palm-trees, and, on the upper reaches of the river, unusually thick bush. You thence passed through a country cut up with narrow sleepy streams, or by the dry barren road, eastward of Lake Kamadou, to the open flats of the Zambesi, the approach from the side of the Chobé being studded with euphorbia-trees, quaint of growth, and excellently named candelabra. Throughout these parts you hardly see a hillock; so rare, indeed, is the sight, that one tiny, isolated mound is named ‘Sisalébue’--‘we are still looking at you’--by the Kafirs, in recognition of the scarcity of even such haycocks. Beyond the Zouga the wonderful abundance of animal life is not maintained. There is game, but not in large herds. The happy hunting grounds in my time began at the Molopo and ended at the Zouga.