152 BIG GAME SHOOTING 
there are ‘ oppositions ’ everywhere, and at all events the seekers 
were the majority. The troublesome neighbours, now we are 
masters, call upon us to rectify the frontier line, which had been 
greatly encroached upon by the Boers. We refuse, or delay, 
to set matters right. Boers’ troublesome neighbours become 
ours. The Zulus are conquered with some difficulty, and the 
Boers, relieved from their anxieties, demand and obtain the 
withdrawal of the suzerainty. This is not my opinion alone. 
The Zulus were our fast friends till we refused to undo the 
wrongs they had suffered at the hands of the Dutchmen—the 
whole story, including the subsequent withdrawal of our troops, 
is a page that one would like to tear out of our annals. 
The character of the country in its different stages is well 
given in the illustrations. There are no striking features ; no 
mountains, no large river, except the Zambesi, and only one 
rather uninteresting lake, ’Ngami ; no great forests, no tropical 
vegetation ; the rains are scanty, the soil dry, the plains large. 
What you see one day you may see for a week. In most 
countries you would have to describe nature in her many 
phases, but in South Africa one might take a paint-brush and ~ 
give a broad, general idea of the land, with four or five streaks 
of colour—the widely extending, ascending, nearly treeless 
flats from Kuruman to the Molopo River ; the broken, fairly 
clothed region of the Bakatla ; and the open park-like scenery 
between them and the rocky homes of the Bakaa and Ba-Mung- 
wato. » Throughout this area the prevailing trees are mimosas ; 
the flowers are of the same genera and orders, undisturbed by 
man—sheets of different kinds are often spread out side by side 
parterre fashion, in separate beds, not mingling even at the 
edges. They have fought the battle out amongst themselves, and 
it has ended in the survival of the fittest, aliens less suited to the 
particular border being crowded out by the stronger natives. 
From the Ba-Mungwato, however, as you dive into the 
Kalahari desert by the Bushmen sucking-holes of ‘Serotli, 
thirty yards of sand suffice to change the growth and families 
of trees and flowers. On the side we struck the hollow, they 
aa oe on 
Peta ee en ne ee 
