140 TRAVELS IN 
fore, as the hunters have approached within a certain distance 
of their game, an opening is made in the circle for the near- 
est animals to pass. All the rest follow in a line ; and while 
by rushing together in their eagerness to pass they retard 
each other, the men, armed with spears, close in upon the 
line and make dreadful havock among them. By this kind 
of hunting, scarcely a springbok is now to be met with in 
Zuure Veldt. We found, however, in the neighbourhood of 
the close country bordering on the Great Fish river, the steen- 
bok, the boschbok, the rietbok, and the orabie, and shot se- 
veral hartebeests. This is om of the finest animals among the 
numerous family of the antelopes. The male is about seven 
feet and a half long and five feet high, and the female six and 
a half feet long and four feet high : the horns branch out of a 
single trunk that projects about two inches from the fore- 
head. The mouth, and indeed the whole head, resembles 
that of the bovine tribe, from whence it has obtained in the 
Systema Naturce the specific name of hubalis. The flesh is 
remarkably good, and resembles very nearly that of beef ; 
and is carefully salted by the boors. 
All the deep chasms or ravines with which the plains of 
this part of the country are intersected, and the banks of all 
the rivers, the sides of the knolls, and the range of hills that 
terminates this division to the northward, are covered with 
coppice wood, consisting generally of tall luxuriant shrubs, 
out of which however sprang up, sometimes singly, and fre- 
quently in clumps, large and beautiful forest trees : of these 
the geelhout was the most lofty, and being here disentangled 
from the pendulous lichen that cramped its growth in the 
