SOUTHERN AFRICA. 23 
farmers breed them ; but it is a fierce and vicious animal, 
and not safe to be approached by strangers. The aardvarkcy 
or earth-hog, the myrmecophaga Capemis, or ant-eater of the 
Cape, is also very common, and, like the porcupine, under- 
mines the ground, seldom quitting its subterranean abode 
except in the night. The thighs of this animal are some- 
times salted, and in that state considered as very good hams. 
The valley of Roode Sand is about thirty miles in length, 
and is inhabited by about forty families. On quitting this 
division, the country becomes wild and almost uninhabited. 
Bogs, swamps, and morass covered with rushes and sour 
plants, large tracts of naked hard cla}^ deep sandy roads, 
pools of stagnant water, and those infallible indications of a 
barren soil, hillocks of ants, are the chief objects that meet the 
eye of the traveller. For several miles together no human 
habitation makes its appearance. In this dreary country there 
was nothing to engage the attention but the vast chain of 
mountains on the left which we were shortly to pass, and 
which here began to round off into an easterly direction. This 
branch was much more wild, lofty, and barren than that 
through which the Kloef of Roode Sand opens a passage. 
It consisted of immense columnar masses of naked sand-stone, 
of a red ferruginous color passing in places into steel-blue. 
The corroded and jagged summits, like the battlements of so 
many towers or minarets, leaned from their bases, and seemed 
to owe their only support to each other. The strata were 
here inclined to the eastward in an angle of about forty 
degrees, and seemed as if ready to slide down over each 
other. Still they were uniformj and had evidently never beei^ 
