50 HOME LIFE ON AN OSTRICH FARM. 



when covered with their masses of bloom. Here and 

 there is a Kaffir bean, a shrub with rather handsome 

 large red flowers, but it is not common. There are a 

 good many colourless, insignificant-looking flowers, and 

 some which are quite uncanny ; one, especially, with 

 pendent, succulent bells of livid green and dull red, 

 looks worthy to be one of the ingredients of a witch's 

 cauldron. These are all flowers of the plains ; the 

 mountains are richer, but their treasures are only to 

 be attained by making rather long excursions up their 

 steep sides, over the roughest and stoniest of ground, 

 and through a tangled mass of vegetation, most of 

 which is very thorny. But even the weariest climb is 

 well repaid on reaching the heights where the wild 

 geraniums grow. The immense round bushes, five or 

 six feet in diameter, and brilliant with great bunches 

 of pink or scarlet flowers, are indeed a lovely sight. 

 A creeping ivy-leaved geranium, and a very pretty 

 pelargonium, which is also a creeper, grow in these 

 same far-off' regions ; the flower of the latter is of a 

 beautiful rich maroon and cream-colour, its curiously 

 jointed stem and tiny leaves are very succulent, salt 

 to the taste, and strongly scented with the sweet gera- 

 nium perfume. It is strange to notice how plants 

 which in Europe are neither saline nor particularly 

 succulent, when growing in the Karroo assume the 

 prevailing character of its vegetation. 



Large white 'marguerites, growing on a shrub with 

 a hard, woody stem, inhabit the same heights as the 

 geraniums and pelargoniums ; all these together would 



