39 



both the winged and wingless state they are wonderfully 

 described in chapter ii. of Joel. 



On these choois, of which there are many, some of them 

 twenty miles long and half as broad, the effect of mirage is 

 more wonderful than I have ever seen it elsewhere. What 

 seems an antelope grows into an elephant, and with the waving 

 of the gauze returns to its actual form a bush. By nearly 

 all these salt-pans there is a spring which may perhaps have 

 once played its part in their formation, or be the relic of 

 the cause. 



At one period of its history, Africa must have been a 

 better watered country than it is now. In the driest tracts, 

 in the waterless woods, you light unexpectedly on deep 

 eroded channels, coming no whither and going nowhere. It 

 gave me the impression that there had been a gradual up- 

 lifting of the surface, and a consequent sinking away of the 

 old torrents and streams. The Bushmen and the elephants 

 dig in these courses for water, which is now never seen on the 

 surface, though the sides are sometimes worn away by its former 

 action, twenty feet down. Over a large area the rainfall is 

 exceedingly small, and in it the trees and grass have adapted 

 themselves to their surrounding conditions. The former all 

 send down long tap-roots through the upper soil to the close 

 substratum, utilising them as the Bushman does the reed in his 

 sucking-holes mentioned elsewhere ; the latter grows with 

 fleshy roots, and from the joints are thrown out delicate fibres 

 ending in small tubers which, through the excessive drought 

 and heat, act as reservoirs of moisture, thus sustaining vitality 

 and enabling a bright green carpet to be spread two days 

 after the fall of the rain. The animals, instinct led, follow the 

 waterfall of the storm, and migrate to and fro in narrow zones. 

 The birds do likewise ; one beautiful hawk happily called 

 from his graceful movement Molela shoquan, ' he flows as he 

 turns' is a most assiduous attendant in the green-room of 

 nature. But the thunderstorms are very partial. For two 

 days I have passed through country so drought-stricken that 



