As time passed, close beside the wagon rose a small square or oblong house built of poles and bushes, and plastered over with mud; and kraals with walls of rough stones or mimosa-branches were raised, and placed as near the house and water supply as possible, to save the stock at night from the depredations of Bushmen or wild beasts, and to facilitate their drinking in the day. Here, as years passed, and his sons and daughters grew up about him, he raised a brick or stone dwelling, solid, square, unornamental, seeming to have as its prototype the old African ox-wagon taken from its wheels, and anchored to one spot of earth. And as time passed, he also often made a dam, to ensure water supply in drought, and sometimes he planted a few willow trees on the wall, and made a small fruit garden below it, fenced round with rough stones. But the beautiful homes of Bovenland, with their massively built houses, and polished wooden floors, raised by the hands of slave workmen, with their oak-avenues and vineyards and rose hedges, have seldom tended to repeat themselves in the more arid regions further north. Without a superfluous detail, or an attempt at ornament, squatting in the red sand and sun of the up-country plains, these little buildings, with their coatings of red sand or hard whitewash, seem almost a spontaneous growth of the land, and, like the brown ant-heaps that dot it everywhere, are indigenous to the country. The Western Boer built as if for his children's children to inhabit: the up-country Boer farm-house of the past, as of to-day, is essentially the home of a nomad;[47] of one who has anchored himself temporarily on a spot of earth, but who is ever ready at any moment to gather his household goods together and move onwards. The typical up-country farm-house is the home of a man who, knowing that he or his children may at any moment leave, can waste no time in ornamenting it. [47] We are, of course, speaking generally. Within the house the same bare simplicity prevails. To-day, as one travels on some high up-country plain, one sees across the flat at the foot of some kopje, or in the centre of a great level, one of these small brown or white structures, with square black patches beside it where its kraals lie. If it be the noon or afternoon of a warm day, as one approaches one finds that all the doors and windows are closed, and nothing living or moving to be seen but a few cocks and hens scratching in the sand, or sitting in the shadow of the house-gable, or perhaps a little hand-lamb looking for a few blades of green among the dried-up bushes about the house, or a couple of great Boer bull-dogs lie in the shade of the wagon-house, and, rising up slowly, approach with heads down and eyes half closed.