There is much talk as to whether the Karoo could not be made more useful agriculturally by the building of great dams, and so be made to supply corn and vegetables in large quantities. This is irrelevant. When all the more readily cultivable places in the world and in South Africa have been brought under the plough, it may pay to turn the Karoo into a garden. The soil is scanty in most parts, sometimes barely covering the rocks. The long droughts, the habitual dryness of the air sucking up all moisture, and the sharp frosts in winter, must make agriculture always difficult, as it is now almost impossible. There are vast tracts covered with sharp stones where it is even difficult for sheep to find a mouthful of pasturage. But the Karoo has a future. It is a sanatorium of the world. It has a climate that is unequalled. It will be visited not only by those seeking recovery from illness, from the moister Zambesi and sub-tropical regions of Africa, but from all parts of the world. The selfish lover of the solitary Karoo may regret it, but the day will come when the inhabitants of the Karoo will cull millions from their dry soil and bare hills, as the inhabitants of the Riviera cull them to-day. At present the Karoo is inhabited sparsely by Boer and English farmers, the homesteads lying often forty or fifty miles apart; and there are a few small villages, often at distances of more than a hundred miles, inhabited by the descendants of Boers and English. The early inhabitants of the country were wandering tribes of Bushmen, whose paintings of animals we may still find under the shelving ledge of rocks, and whose arrow-heads of bone and flint may be still picked up at the sources of some spring they frequented. They are now gone, like the game which filled these plains sixty years ago; a few wandering remnants may be found in the extreme north-east, and a few ragged individuals in cast-off European clothing may be seen about the back doors of farm-houses. The whole of the Karoo now forms part of the Cape Colony. If we leave the Karoo and go north and east, we find ourselves still on table-lands as high or higher, but the character has changed. The earth is more completely covered with soil, the hills are smaller and more rounded, the plains are softer, wider, more rolling, and grass has taken the place of the Karoo bush. At first, one who has lived long in the Karoo experiences a sense almost of relief at the changed nature of the scene; the soft, rolling outlines give one a sense of repose, and tension is relaxed; it is as when, long accustomed to live with some strongly marked individual nature, one comes for the first time into contact with one more negative and weak: for the first moment there is a sense of relief; then one wearies, and hungers again for the more positive and active.