140 KLOOF AND KARROO. 



a neat right and left tumbles over a brace of the 

 gallant birds. The improvement in my shooting 

 adds just the required fillip of zest to the charms 

 of the scene around, and with elastic step I move 

 onwards more rapidly towards the ground where I 

 expect to find the red-wing partridges. There is 

 a track plainly visible as I walk, though it is here 

 and there overgrown by the luxuriant vegetation 

 — a track worn by centuries of the ponderous 

 tramp of elephants that once browsed amid these 

 mountains. But the elephants have been driven, 

 inore than a generation ago, by the hungry ivory 

 hunters, to their last strongholds in the impenetrable 

 bush-veldt of the Sunday and Great Fish Rivers, 

 and the dark jungles of the Knysna Forest, where 

 they yet linger in the Old Colony. For the space 

 of nearly half-an-hour there is no game to be seen 

 worth the shooting, although I am not alone. In 

 the bushes near me the sun-birds or sugar-birds — 

 Les Sii-criers of the old French traveller, Le 

 Vaillant (who, by - the - bye, crossed these very 

 mountains in 1784, through a poort not twenty 

 miles distant), flutter restlessly from flower to 

 flower, extracting the sweet juices with their long 

 tongues. Songless though they are, the plumage 

 of these birds is glorious ; brilliant shining greens, 

 marvellous blues, reds, and yellows, and orange gold 

 predominate in their colouring. Solomon, in all his 

 glory, was not more gorgeously arrayed. At length 

 I espy a bird long wished for— a bird that creeps 

 slyly in and out of the brake, as if to escape the 

 eyes even of its feathered fellews. I know him at 

 once for the bush lory, and hastily slipping in 

 cartridges of finer shot, I quietly follow him up, till. 



