had been broken but yesterday? Those motionless hills; the very knotted Karoo stem at your hand, for how many generations have the leaves sprouted and fallen from its gnarled stalk? The Bushman and the wild buck have crept over the scene; they have gone, and the Englishman with his horse and gun have come; but the plain lies with its sharp stones turned to the sky unchanged through the centuries. Those two stones standing loosely one upon another have stood so for thousands of years, because there was no hand to sever them. It is not fear one feels, with that clear, blue sky above one; that which creeps over one is not dread. It was amid such scenes as these, amid such motionless, immeasurable silences, that the Oriental mind first framed its noblest conception of the unknown, the "I am that I am" of the Hebrew. Nor less wonderful is the Karoo at night, when the Milky Way forms a white band across the sky; and you stand alone outside, and see the velvety, blue-black vault rising slowly on one side of the horizon and sinking on the other; and the silence is so intense you seem almost to hear the stars move. Nor is it less wonderful on moonlight nights, when you sit alone on a kopje; and the moon has arisen and the light is pouring over the plain; then even the stones are beautiful; and what you have believed of human love and fellowship--and never grasped--seems all possible to you. And not less rare is the sunrise, when the hills, which have been purple in the dawn, turn suddenly to gold, and the rays of light shoot fifty miles across the plain and make every drop on the ice-plants sparkle. Nor less wonderful are the sunsets, when you go out at evening after the day's work. The fierce heat is over; as you walk, a cool breath touches your cheek; you look up and all the hills are turned pink and purple, and a curious light lies on the top of the Karoo bushes; they are all gilded; then it vanishes, and along the horizon there are bars of gold and crimson against a pale emerald sky; and then everything begins to turn grey. In the Karoo there are also mirages. As you travel along the great plains, such as those between Beaufort and De Aar, you continually see, in hot weather, far off on the horizon, lakes with the sunlight sparkling on the water; there are islands and palm trees and domes and minarets and snow-capped mountains. If you remain for half an hour they do not change. Why the mirage should always take the shape of lakes, islands, and palm trees, is something which science, in giving us its cause, has not accounted for.