If we return to the Western districts of the Cape Colony, and leaving the coast belt, climb one of the high mountain ranges that here, as everywhere else, bound the coast belt separating it from the centre of the country, we shall find to our surprise that on reaching its summit, we make hardly any descent on the other side; and that what appeared from the south to be a high mountain range was merely the edge of a vast plateau. We shall find ourselves on an undulating plain, bounded on every side by small fantastic hills. The air is dry and clear; so light that we draw a long breath to make sure we are breathing it aright. The sky above is a more transparent blue than nearer the coast, and seems higher. There is not a blade of grass to be seen growing anywhere; the red sand is covered with bushes a few inches high, clothed with small, hard leaves of dull, olive-green; here and there is an ice-plant, or a stapelia with fleshy, cactus-like leaves, or a rod-like milk bush. As far as the eye can reach, there is often not a tree or a shrub more than two feet high; and far, in the distance, rising abruptly out of the plain, are perhaps two solitary flat-topped mountains; nearer at hand are small conical hillocks, made of round iron-stones piled so regularly on one another that they seem the work of man rather than nature. In the still, clear air you can see the rocks on a hill ten miles off as if they were beside you; the stillness is so intense that you can hear the heaving of your own breast. This is the Karoo. To the stranger, oppressive, weird, fantastic, it is to the man who has lived with it a scene for the loss of which no other on earth compensates. As you travel through it after fifteen, twenty, or fifty miles, you may come upon a farm. The house, a small brown or white speck in the vast landscape, lies at the foot of a range of hills or a small "kopje," with its sheep kraals on the slope behind it, of large brown squares, enclosed by low stone walls. Sometimes there is a garden before the house also enclosed by stone walls, and containing fruit trees, and there is a dam with willow trees planted beside; sometimes there is no dam and no garden, and the little brown mud house stands there baking in the sun with its kraals behind it; the only water for men or beasts coming from some small unseen spring. Throughout the Karoo there are few running streams; the waters of any fountains which may exist are quickly drunk up by the dry soil, and men and animals are largely dependent on artificial dams filled by rain-water. The farmer makes his livelihood from flocks of sheep which wander over the Karoo, and which in good years flourish on its short dry bushes.