He dismissed the matter from his mind and read for a while; but the blistering heat in the sun-scorched compartment made it difficult to concentrate the attention on anything for long. And there was no escape from the heat, not even when night fell, bringing darkness without coolness to the earth, and a hushed silence, penetrated by the insistent, shrill chirp of the crickets and the intrusive rush of the train through the night-shadowed land. He slept about eleven, and awoke to a golden sunrise and another cloudless blue day. But the breadth of the early day was fresh and sweet and wonderfully pure. He drew it into his lungs, leaning from the carriage window, surveying the parched landscape, and the gaping fissures in the almost dry beds of the river, along the banks of which the thorny mimosa grew, the reluctant dewdrops hiding in the hollows of its shrivelled leaves from the too searching rays of the sun. The railway curved sharply, winding in and out among the hills, so that from the window the tail of the train was visible, seeming like a second train cutting the first in the middle. Beyond Hutchinson the line was being repaired. A row of white tents alongside the rails, with their owners squatted in the openings having breakfast, caused Matheson a queer, unaccustomed stab of envy. This was what he ought to be doing-- useful work for the country, instead of using the metals to career about on a fool's errand. The train had slowed down. He leaned farther out of the window and shouted to a sunburnt man who stood astride outside his tent, with a tin mug in one hand and part of a loaf in the other. "You, Saunders!" he yelled. "What ho! Want an extra hand down there?" The person addressed as Saunders grinned amiably; and another man came to the opening of the tent and stood behind him, interested, stripped to the waist, and towelling vigorously. "Tumble out," shouted Saunders. "I dare say we could make use of you." And then the train left the white tents and their tanned owners behind; and Matheson drew in his head with a feeling of sharp dissatisfaction with life, and thought of these men enviously, until the steadily increasing warmth of the day brought back to his memory the stuffy unbearableness of heat accumulated under canvas; and his imagination pictured anew the treeless, sunbaked nature of the land where those jolly cool-looking white tents were pitched. It wasn't after all much of a picnic. He arrived at De Aar about noon, and went to the hotel, and had a bath and changed before sitting down to lunch. He had not been in this Karroo town before, and it struck him as fine and picturesque and altogether characteristic. The country was flat and open, and the veld greener and less drought-stricken.