SOUTHERN AFRICA. 371 
party to bring them to a conversation were unavailing. Two 
of them retired, and the third, after much persuasion by 
signs, advanced near enough to receive a ration of tobacco 
for himself and two for his companions, when he also in- 
stantly vanished. 
On the midst of this grassy plain our travellers came to an 
extensive lake, the water of which wa* so very salt as to be 
wholly unfit for use either by man or beast. -At the distance 
of five miles beyond this lake tliej'^ came to a second, and 
farther on to a third, all of the same description. Rising by a 
gentle ascent from this plain to one of much greater elevation, 
they arrived on the 1st November at the entrance of a poort or 
chasm in a ridge of high hills where, for the first time since leav- 
ing the mountain of the Roggevcld, a distance not much short 
of two hundred miles, they had met with any species of plant 
which could be said to bear the resemblance of a tree. From 
these lonely wastes of Africa, " where," as Dr. Johnson ob- 
serves of part of Scotland, " the traveller has nothing to con- 
" template but grounds that have no visible boundaries," 
nature seems to have withheld her bounteous hand, and 
doomed them to cheerless, irremediable, and consequently 
perpetual, sterility. On the spot, however, \vhere the tra- 
vellers were now arrived the sides of the hills were enlivened 
by shrubby plants and straggling trees, and whole forests ap- 
peared in many of the vallies. The face of the country began 
now to assume a pleasing and an interesting aspect, and still 
more so towards the middle of the same day, when the party 
arrived on the southern bank of a river of very considerable 
magnitude, called by the natives the Garlep, biit by the 
3 B 2 
