Chapter III. 



HIS JOURNEY TO SOUTH AFRICA. 



An account of a voyage to the Cape in the late 

 fifties of last century would have been as the cool 

 waters of an oasis to those who travel with me 

 through this desert of the fossil world, but Brown s 

 pressing caravan had no time for such refreshment. 

 He did actually make notes on his journey to 

 South Africa, but, whatever the impressions of 

 this observant man might have been worth to us, 

 they ultimately lost all value to him, and were 

 destroyed with those early pages in his Journal 

 to which I have already referred. 



We do not therefore know what effect the sight 

 of that first stark mountain, which he saw from 

 Table Bay, had upon him. Why should he keep 

 the picture post-card of it which he had made in 

 words, when he had painted for posterity his more 

 massive canvas of the Stormberg mountains, 

 when he could see from his back door the thrice 

 prouder peaks of the distant Malutis in Basuto- 

 land? Was this voyage not just the drab and 

 dreary means by which he reached what was to 

 him his infinitely more important end? 



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