Matheson's gaze travelled over the scene, travelled to the distant hills, and rested there. A dark shadow like a black stain lay upon the hillside, the curious effect of some unseen cloud. In his imagination it seemed a significant, even a sinister, shadow. He watched it for a time, but it moved so slowly that it did not appear to move at all, but to be in reality a black stain on the face of the land. He removed his gaze, and when later he looked again the shadow had passed. "This is the real thing," he said--"the key to Africa. The Karroo is the small sister of the Sahara." Suddenly, moved by some unaccountable emotion, he turned towards her swiftly. "How can you endure living here?" he asked. "The loneliness... Heavens! the loneliness... It suggests a world in the making. The beauty! ... Yes, I acknowledge the beauty, the terrible beauty of it. But--how often do you see a human face besides your own?" She broke into a quiet laugh. "Not often. But then, we are busy; we don't trouble about such things. The blood of the old Voortrekkers runs in our veins. At least there is freedom here." "Gods! I should say so," he responded, and fell to contemplating once more the sameness of those leagues upon leagues of interminable, sun-scorched veld, with its dried-up water-courses, its gaping fissures, and scrubby blackened bush, among which at long intervals pushed the smooth green fingers of the milkbush, and the stunted, gnarled trunks of the butterbloem, yellow as though smeared with sulphur, with bell-shaped flowers blooming on long blood-red stems. Boulders of iron-stone broke the sameness, and an occasional hill, rounded or peaked, not rising gradually but seeming to have been dumped down there, or happened otherwise by accident. Honor's eyes rested dreamily upon the scene. "You should see it after the rains fall," she said. "It is wonderful then." "It is wonderful now," he returned. "I have never beheld anything so extraordinarily moving and impressive." "But you don't like it," she said quickly. "Oh, like! ... the term scarcely applies. I couldn't live here... I'd be afraid to live here--not physically, of course. I mean it's so immense, so unpeopled. The Karroo is jealous of life; it crushes it. I'd go down under the spell of it. I can imagine a man falling into the habit of talking aloud to himself here--for company." "One need not live alone," she said. "You love the solitudes," he said, looking at her wonderingly. "Yes; I suppose I do. I love the veld... It is my blood--that intense love of the land."