THE GEOGRAPHICAL CYCLE 421 



valleys in the ordinary sense of that term, but would lie in the broad sur- 

 face of faint depressions between equally faint swells : there would be no 

 hills, no escarpments, no terraces. The agencies of transportation would 

 have come to be so nicely fitted to their work that the streams would be 

 everj^where competent to sweep along the load of waste supplied to them 

 by the weathering agencies; the soils might be deeper in one kind of rock 

 or shallower in another kind, but there would be no heavy accumulations 

 of transported soil; alluvial deposits would occur only in relatively nar- 

 row and shallow belts along the stream courses. 



Now a land form of this kind is seldom found; it is a geographical 

 rarity. Plains are common enough, but plains such as those of northern 

 India or western Turkestan are not the work of erosion, but of deposition, 

 and should not be confounded with plains of erosion, just described. 

 Some geographers have indeed urged that the crust of the earth has not 

 anywhere stood still long enough for the production of a plain of erosion ; 

 hence all the more interest would attach to such a plain if it were found. 



THE OPEN VELD A PLAIN OF EROSION 



Before leaving Cape Town we were told that the scenery along the rail- 

 way line on the interior highland or Veld to Johannesburg was monot- 

 onous and uninteresting. I made that journey in the sympathetic com- 

 pany of Professors Penck, of Vienna, and Coleman, of Toronto, when we 

 were hurrying from the geological excursion in the Karroo with Mr 

 Eogers to another excursion in Vryheit with Messrs Anderson and Molen- 

 graaff; and seldom has a railway journey proved more entertaining than 

 the daylight run we made over the Veld from De Aar to Bloemfontein, 

 for we crossed miles and miles of plains that repeated in nearly every re- 

 spect the features of the ideal worn-down land surface, such as belongs 

 in the latter part of the physiographic cycle of land forms. This profit- 

 able experience was repeated on the return from Johannesburg around to 

 Kimberley, when we saw in the morning a stretch of the Veld north of 

 Bloemfontein that had been crossed at night on our way up country. I 

 Mall first point out the elements in which the actual features of this region 

 support the scheme of the cycle, then mention some special features, and 

 finally ask attention to some problematic matters concerning which a 

 much more extended study of South Africa must be made than that 

 which was possible in our short excursion. 



There are many stretches of Veld— open, treeless, unfenced country, 

 hundreds or thousands of square miles in area and several thousand feet 

 above sealevel — that would be called level plains even by a rather careful 

 observer ; but they are not precisely level, as a view back or forward along 



