178 KLOOF AND KARROO. 



inwardly thanked Pringle, the poet of South Africa, 

 for his sweet and touching verse, written with the 

 love of this strange wild land deep in him, for his 

 striking descriptions of its beauties and its fauna. 

 As I lay panting that night, cursing my luck and 

 the folly that brought me thither, I lit a lantern, and 

 opened his glowing pages. What were almost the 

 first lines to greet my gaze ? These ! 



■ A region of emptiness, howling and drear, 

 Which man hath abandoned, from famine and fear ; 

 Which the snake and the Uzard inhabit alone. 

 With the twilight bat from the yawning stone ; 

 Where grass, nor herb, nor shrub, takes root, 

 Save poisonous thorns, that pierce the foot ; 

 And here, while the night-winds around me sigh. 

 And the stars burn bright in the midnight sky, 

 As I sit apart, by the desert stone. 

 Like Elijah at Horeb's cave alone, 

 " A still, small voice " comes through the wild, 

 (Like a father consoling his fretful child). 

 Which banishes bitterness, wrath, and fear, 

 Saying, — Man is distant, but God is near.' 



"True! True! And so, thanks to Pringle, I 

 bore up through that most miserable night, with a 

 stouter heart, an easier mind." 



Here the transport-rider paused in his story, got 

 up, and diving into his waggon, pulled out a small 

 volume, roughly bound in the soft skin of an Ourebi 

 fawn. Opening its well-thumbed pages, he showed 

 us the passage he had just quoted, deeply scored in 

 pencil. "There," said he, "is the very book poor 

 Mowbray read that night; there is the passage, 

 marked with his own hand. Every line of it I know 

 by heart, and his book I treasure greatly, and nearly 

 always carry with me." Then he resumed his 

 narrative. 



