IN SOUTH AFRICA. 245 
The Great Fish River is distant, in the nearest part, about 
twelve miles from Graham’s Town, and the great tract of 
bush which borders it throughout its course, in some places 
approaches within six miles of the town. This Fish River 
Bush, so noted in the history of the late Caffer war, is a tract 
of country of most rugged and savage character; not exactly 
mountainous, but a chaos of great hills, which run generally 
in long flat ridges, with very steep but not rocky sides, and 
are divided by extremely deep, narrow, gloomy valleys; hill 
and valley alike covered with impenetrably thick bush, as 
dense as the undergrowth of a Brazilian forest, and much 
more thorny. I cannot conceive a country more difficult to 
make one's way through. The shrubs are in general the 
same as those which occur near the Sunday River; but, in 
addition, there is abundauce of the great Tree-Euphorbia, 
which I have described a few pages back, of the Strelitzia, 
(at this time out of flower,) and of the Zamia horrida, with 
its stiff, spiny, palm-like leaves springing from the top of a 
short thick stem which looks like a pine-apple. ; 
l never saw in any other part of the world anything 
resembling the Fish River Bush; nor, I should think, does 
there exist a tract so difficult to penetrate or to clear. 
The vegetation is so succulent that fire has no effect on it 
even in the dryest weather, and at the same time so strong 
and rigid and excessively dense that there is no getting 
through it without cutting your way at every step, unless in 
the paths made by wild beasts. Yet the Caffers make their 
way through with wonderful skill and activity, creeping like 
‘Snakes among the thickets, where no white man can follow 
them; and this covert extending so far along the frontier, is 
of great advantage to them, both in their predatory and hostile - 
incursions, as they can muster in force and even approach 
to within a few miles of Graham’s Town without being 
observed, vci d 
Not more than twenty years ago, I have been told, the 
Fish River Bush swarmed with Elephants and other wild 
beasts. Mr. Clarke once saw fifty elephants together near 
