But in its most characteristic form the bush consists of large isolated clumps of vegetation. The kunee, a vast creeper-like tree, whose interlaced branches, touching the ground everywhere, forming beehive-shaped masses, looking like immense Kaffir huts, often, though not always, forms the foundation of these masses; around it spring up elephant's food, namnam, geraniums and plumbago, and perhaps a tall euphorbia tree, with its cactus-like leaves, shoots up into the air through it. These clumps of vegetation, sometimes almost solid, and often forty or fifty feet in circumference, are divided from others by spaces of short, smooth grass, generally brown except after the early rains. In this bush it is particularly easy to lose yourself. As you pass round clump after clump, there are always others of exactly the same shape before you, and you sometimes find you have gone two or three times round the same mass of vegetation. Oxen once lost in this bush are not easily discovered for days, though hidden behind the next clump, and it is almost hopeless to look for them unless one can gain an eminence and oversee a wide stretch of country. In this bush several Europeans have lost their lives during the last fifteen years. It is the peculiar home of the great scarlet geranium now common in English hot-houses, and of the delicate, blue, star-like plumbago, and of endless ferns; but the heaths and bulbs of the Western Province are not found here. Eighty years ago it was alive with elephant, lion, bush-buck, and wild animals of all kinds. Now, the elephant is extinct, except where artificially preserved; bush-buck are scarce; a few large leopards may still be found in sequestered kloofs, and wild cats and monkeys and parrots are yet abundant, but a lion has not been seen for forty years. Thousands of small birds feed on the berries that abound here, and fifty small birds may sometimes be heard chirping in the depths of one kunee tree. Eighty years ago, the inhabitants of this tract were warlike Kaffir tribes of the Bantu race. They have not been exterminated as the Hottentots and Bushmen in the west have largely been, but are still found as the servants on farms and in towns. The white inhabitants at the present day are mainly English, the descendants largely of a group of emigrants who landed here in 1820, and who proved themselves one of the most entirely successful and satisfactory bodies of emigrants whom England has ever sent forth. Here and there throughout the entire tract are scattered small English towns and villages; and thriving farms, where sheep and agriculture go together, are hidden away in the bush.