192 THE MIGRATION OF HIRUNDO RUSTIC A. 



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 

 a rainbow'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 

 {Connochcetes 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 l8th 

 of November, 1895, incorporated to the Cape Colony. 



