Departing from Capetown by night, I awoke in the Karroo. Between nine and six in the morning we had made less than a hundred and eighty miles. Now we were climbing the vast desert of the Karroo, the dusty stairway that leads on to the highlands of South Africa. Once you have seen one desert, all the others are like it; and yet once you have loved the desert, each is lovable in a new way. In the Karroo you seem to be going up a winding ascent, like the ramps that lead to an Indian fortress. You are ever pulling up an incline between hills, making for a corner round one of the ranges. You feel that when you get round that corner you will at last see something: you arrive and only see another incline, two more ranges, and another corner--surely this time with something to arrive at beyond. You arrive and arrive, and once more you arrive--and once more you see the same vast nothing you are coming from. Believe it or not, that is the very charm of a desert--the unfenced emptiness, the space, the freedom, the unbroken arch of the sky. It is for ever fooling you, and yet you for ever pursue it. And then it is only to the eye that cannot do without green that the Karroo is unbeautiful. Every other colour meets others in harmony--tawny sand, silver-grey scrub, crimson-tufted flowers like heather, black ribs of rock, puce shoots of screes, violet mountains in the middle distance, blue fairy battlements guarding the horizon. And above all broods the intense purity of the South African azure--not a coloured thing, like the plants and the hills, but sheer colour existing by and for itself. It is sheer witching desert for five hundred miles, and for aught I know five hundred miles after that. At the rare stations you see perhaps one corrugated-iron store, perhaps a score of little stone houses with a couple of churches. The land carries little enough stock--here a dozen goats browsing on the withered sticks goats love, there a dozen ostriches, high-stepping, supercilious heads in air, wheeling like a troop of cavalry and trotting out of the stink of that beastly train. Of men, nothing--only here at the bridge a couple of tents, there at the culvert a black man, grotesque in sombrero and patched trousers, loafing, hands in pockets, lazy pipe in mouth. The last man in the world, you would have said, to suggest glorious war--yet war he meant and nothing else. On the line from Capetown--that single track through five hundred miles of desert--hang Kimberley and Mafeking and Rhodesia: it runs through Dutch country, and the black man was there to watch it. War--and war sure enough it was. A telegram at a tea-bar, a whisper, a gathering rush, an electric vibration--and all the station and all the train and the very niggers on the dunghill outside knew it. War--war at last! Everybody had predicted it--and now everybody gasped with amazement. One man broke off in a joke about killing Dutchmen, and could only say, "My God--my God--my God!"