To the east of the Free State lies Basutoland, the Switzerland of South Africa, rich in its mountains and with a climate of superb quality. Here is to be found the Basuto nation, a people whose history since their foundation under their valiant chieftainess Ma' Katees is probably more epic than that of any other people in South Africa, save that of the old fore-trekkers who founded the Transvaal Republic. Again, north of Natal lie Zululand and the adjoining native territories where the virile Bantu tribe of Zulus, along with other Bantu peoples, may be found inhabiting an almost tropical and luxuriantly fertile country: while further north and east yet along the coast stretch the Portuguese territories, the remnants of Portugal's once large empire, naturally rich and productive, but in many parts low-lying and fever-smitten. This, then, is South Africa; the country which the South African regards as his native land. To the superficial observer nothing would be more unlike than its differing parts; between the falls of the Zambesi with their spray-drenched forest and their banks, unchanged by civilization as when the eye of Livingstone first beheld them more than thirty years ago, and a little Eastern Province town, with its narrow, conventional life; between the wilds of Namaqualand, where the little Bushman still sits down behind his bush to cook his supper of animal entrails and lies down with the stars over him, and the white house and tree-lined streets of the Paarl; between the Kalahari, where under a thorn tree groups of antelopes are gathered in the moonlight, and the gambling saloons and music-halls of Johannesburg and Kimberley; between the kraals of Kaffirland, where the Kaffir boys are holding their "abakweta" dances in the moonlight with whitened faces, and the drawing-rooms of Cape Town, where women in low dresses sit aimlessly talking, there seems little in common. Nevertheless, through the whole of South Africa there runs a certain unity. It is not only that geraniums and plumbago, flat-topped mountains, aloes and euphorbia are peculiar to our land, and that sand and rocks abound everywhere; nor is it even that the land is everywhere young, and full of promise; but there is a certain colossal plenitude, a certain large freedom in all its natural proportions, which is truly characteristic of South Africa. If Nature here wishes to make a mountain, she runs a range for five hundred miles; if a plain, she levels eighty; if a rock, she tilts five thousand feet of strata on end; our skies are higher and more intensely blue; our waves larger than others; our rivers fiercer. There is nothing measured, small nor petty in South Africa.