192 THE MIGRATION OF HIRUNDO RUSTICA. 
one yard high, and the slender stems of this high grass, wav- 
ing to and fro in the northwesterly breeze, are interwoven 
with numerous blossoms, showing all the colors which form 
arainbow’s beauty. Everywhere on the immense flat, bounded 
by the blue sky of the horizon only, whereto we turn our 
eyes, and plainly to be seen from the small hill, an elevation 
formed by the white alluvial karoo tuff-stone, herds of 
game are visible. Large troops of the blessbuck (Damalis 
albifrons) are quietly grazing; small herds of the black gnu 
(Connochetes gnu) are here and there enjoying their circular 
runs, the latter to hunters known as “wildebeest dances,” 
But most numerous of all are the graceful springbucks, 
Antidorcas euchore, which in herds of hundreds in all direc- 
tions are to be seen; many of them, unruly in their play- 
fulness, leap up eight feet above the ground, bounding one 
over the other.* Among the antelopes and gnus, Cranes, 
single as well as in pairs and troops of fifty or more, are 
walking up and down, feeding upon the numerous locusts 
and upon the white ants—the nests of which latter, about 
two feet high and hemispherical, or in the form of tubes 
two to four feet high, are to be found in hundreds of thou- 
sands upon the Harts and Mo-lapo Spruit plains. f 
Just in front of us and down below in the grassy plains the 
dark waters of a large pool glisten and quiver in, the reddish 
shine of the subsiding sun. In its centre, this being the orifice 
of an underground cave, common to the dark-gray dolomite 
formation of these plains, the pool is of very great depth; 
otherwise it is shallow in its greatest extent, and such places 
are overgrown with a thicket of tall, rustling reeds, One of 
these abodes forms truly a centre of bird-life in the immense 
plain, so large in extent as not to be overglanced by the human 
eye, not even from the elevated position which we are occupy- 
* The gnus and blessbucks have since been annihilated; only a few 
springbucks remain. 
t In this portion of southeastern British-Bechuanaland since the 18th 
of November, 1895, incorporated to the Cape Colony. 
