Account of the Fish River Bush, South Africa. 77 



water to be springing out to moisten the arid ground. The 

 succulent nature of some of the vegetation of the Bush is 

 said to supply this deficiency to some extent to its herbivorous 

 frequenters. 



The valley country, when viewed from the ridge of its 

 boundaries, presents a chaos of hills, kloofs, and krantzes, 

 with intervening patches of more level ground, and strikes 

 one with something like a feeling of silent sublimity at its 

 deserted repose, its sombre dark green or brownish green 

 appearance, according to the season, its interminable extent, 

 and the absence of any cultivated spot of ground, or even of 

 a house. As a part of the whole, the valley of the Ecca, look- 

 ing east from a favourable height, presents a gradually di- 

 verging valley entirely covered with bush, some eight or ten 

 miles long by six broad, at the termination of the view, 

 which is closed in by the bushy hills and kloofs of the east 

 side of the Fish River Valley at Committee's Drift. Forming 

 the south boundary of the valley is a range of disrupted bushy 

 hills, with intervening deep and rugged kloofs and ravines, 

 which constituted the retreat of Jan Pockbaas and his rebel 

 banditti. The rvorth side of the valley is filled up by the 

 high lands about the Grass-Kop, the sides of which are 

 deeply broken by dark kloofs and bushy ridges. In the ex- 

 treme distance at the left, and situated on the bank of the 

 Great Fish River, may be discerned a yellow spot, Com- 

 mittee's Post, now untenanted since the last war. 



Some undefined feelings become impressed from the reflec- 

 tion, that within these recesses hordes of savages have lived, 

 and that underneath the foliage, impenetrable and insensible to 

 the burning rays of a noonday sun, and unmoved by a breath 

 of air, repose the leopard in his lair, and the poisonous snake 

 in his coil, and that once stalked through it the stately ele- 

 phant and the headstrong rhinoceros. One can scarcely sur- 

 vey it as you would a battle-field, and point out such and 

 such spots as marked by hairbreadth escapes from, and con- 

 flicts with, savage foes, as such events here all transpire under 

 the surface of this gloomy mantle, the personification of life- 

 less, perennial repose. One cannot survey it as you would a 

 map, and point out the streams, the roads, the boundaries 



