SOUTH AFRICA FIFTY YEARS AGO 39 
“both the winged and wingless state they are wonderfully 
_ described in chapter ii. of Joel. 
i 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 
| seemsan 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 Mo/e/a shoguan, ‘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 
