“The character of the South African ‘bush’ has features quite peculiar in itself, and sometimes unites--while strongly contrasting--the grand and sublime with the grotesque and ridiculous. When seen afar from a commanding elevation--the undulating sea of verdure extending for miles and miles, with a bright sun shining on a green, compact, unbroken surface--it conveys to the mind of a spectator naught save images of repose, peace, and tranquillity. He forgets that, like the hectic bloom of a fatal malady, these smiling seas of verdure often in their entangled depths conceal treacherous, death-dealing reptiles, ferocious beasts of prey, and the still more dangerous, though no less crafty, and more cruel Kaffir. “On a nearer approach, dark glens and gloomy kloofs are found to fence the mountain sides. These often merge downward into deep ravines, forming at their base sometimes the bed of a clear, gurgling brook, or that of a turbid, raging torrent, generally shadowed and overhung by abundant vegetation, in all the luxuriance of tropical growth and profusion. Noble forest trees, entwined with creepers, encircled by parasitical plants and with long gray mantles of lichen, loosely and beardlike floating from their spreading limbs, throw the ‘brown horrors’ of a shadowy gloom o’er the dark, secluded, Druidical-looking dells. But jabbering apes, or large, satyr-like baboons, performing grotesque antics and uttering unearthly yells, grate strangely on the ear, and sadly mar the solemnity of the scene; whilst lofty, leafless, and fantastic euphorbia, like huge candelabra, shoot up in bare profusion from the gray, rocky cliffs, pointing as it were in mockery their skeleton arms at the dark and luxuriant foliage around. Other plants of the cactus and milky tribes--of thorny, rugged, or smooth and fleshy kinds--stretch forth in every way their bizarre, misshapen forms; waving them to the breeze, from yon high, beetling crags, so thickly clothed to their very base with graceful nojebooms, and drooping, palm-like aloes; whose tall, slender, and naked stems spring up from amidst the dense verdure of gay and flowering mimosas. “Emerging from such darksome glens to the more sunny side of the mountain’s brow, there we still find an impenetrable bush, but differing in character from what we have just described--a sort of high, thorny underwood, composed chiefly of the mimosa and portulacacia tribe; taller, thicker, more impenetrable, and of more rigid texture than even the tiger’s accustomed lair in the far depths of an Indian jungle; but, withal, so mixed and mingled with luxuriant, turgid, succulent plants and parasites, as--even during the dryest weather--to be totally impervious to the destroying influence of fire.