As sweeping across these wide Colonial plains to-day, one looks out at them from the windows of the railway train, silent as they still lie, it is not easy to recall what they must have appeared in the eyes of those first-born white sons of South Africa whose wagons, moving slowly along, broke for the first time into these vast, silent plains. Across each one some white man's eye looked for the first time, taking in the expanse, which till then only the Bushman had seen as he tracked his game, or the Hottentot as he travelled with his tribe; across each one of them some solitary wagon first crept, leaving the marks of its wheels deep in the red sand, which in all the ages of the past had been printed only by the feet of the antelope and the claw of the ostrich and lion, or the light tread of the Bushman and Hottentot--and the mark of those wheels made the first track of that road on which, later but surely, civilization with its colossal evils, and its infinite beneficial possibilities, was to follow. At night, when they had drawn up their wagons beside some iron-stone kopje, or near the bed of a sloot[41] where there might be water in the sand, they heard the jackals howl about them (as you may still hear them at almost any farm in the Karoo, if in the night you will walk a mile or two from the house and sit down alone on the rocks) and the lion's roar, which for the span of more than a life has not been heard there now. And in the morning, when they woke and peered out between the sails of the wagon, within a stone's throw they saw the springbok feeding with wildebeest[42] among them; and when the sun rose, and they stood up on the wagon-chest and scanned the plain, they rejoiced if they saw far off a vley[43] where their cattle might drink; and if they saw none, they looked about for any indication of those carefully concealed drinking-places of the little Bushman, so well covered with stones, lest the wild animals might tread them in, or strangers drink the water; if they found none, and digging in the sand of the river-beds yielded too little for their cattle, then they trekked on. If they found enough, then they often stayed for awhile till the veld was brown and barren and the game gone and then they trekked again. [41] Sloot = watercourse. [42] Wildebeest = the gnu. [43] Vley = depression with water.