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sunshine, roasting heat, and terrestrial drought, which fence in the 
Cape Colony along its northern and north-western frontiers almost as 
imperviously to all ordinary travellers as though they were walls of 
iron rising up to skies of brass, and intended to prevent inquirers 
from entering into the mysterious interior beyond, stretching away, 
as it was then supposed, uninterruptedly to the Equator itself. 
A Kaffir war breaking out soon afterwards on the north-east 
frontier of the colony, the expedition was lost for a time to sight 
and hearing ; but after three years it returned safe, successfully too, 
on the whole, and with C. D. Bell raised by shere merit and proved 
capacity to be its second in command. But he had done far more 
than merely rule over others, and order their services ; for when 
the Association which had defrayed the expenses of the expedition 
held a public meeting in 1836 to exhibit its results (a meeting at 
which Sir John Herschel, then in the colony on astronomical 
research, presided, and gave a splendid address), every one was 
astonished, delighted, and instructed at finding the walls of the 
room decorated by nearly three hundred of C. D. Bell’s drawings. 
He had been the artist of the expedition, and such an artist as 
showed him to possess a soul of true genius, if there be any one in 
the world of whom that can be properly said. 
There, in those matchless drawings, was the peculiar country the 
expedition had passed through, in its minuter as well as larger 
features ; unadulterated, moreover, artistically by any methods of 
drawing taught at home on English trees and hedges and shady 
lanes; for C. D. Bell had taught himself in South Africa on exactly 
what nature presented to him there. Hence was the great interior’s 
physical geography, geology, and vegetation, too, where there was any, 
depicted again and again, either in brilliant colour, or chiaroscuro 
force of black and white, and almost perfect truth of outline ; with 
the very atmosphere also before one to look into, as it shimmered 
and boiled in the vividness of solar light, and over stony surfaces 
heated up to 140° or 150° Eahr. ; but yet garnished with episodes 
of the wild animals of the region — generally gigantic mammals, of 
South Africa to-day, but of other parts of the earth only in some 
past geological age ; and with lifelike examples of the natives of 
every tribe whose lands the expedition had traversed, depicted in 
their most characteristic avocations. From little Bushmen securing 
