CHAPTER XVII. 
THE BONTEBOK, 
Lo! where in triumph o'er his boundless plain, 
The free-born chief of Lybia laves to reign ; 
With fires proportion’d to his native sky, 
Strength in his arm, and lightning in his eye— 
Scours with wild feet his sun-illumin’d zone, 
The spear, the wild buck, and the woods his own, 
Upon the ocean-like and untrodden prairies of the interior — those especially lying south of the Vaal river, of which 
large tracts are strongly impregnated with saline particles—the incredible numbers of the Pied Antelope here depicted, and of 
its still gayer congener the Blesbok, that are frequently congregated in the vicinity of the salt flats of the few stagnant 
pools of brackish water, would seem almost to realize fable. There is in these brilliant herbivorous assemblages something 
peculiarly wild and striking, and one feels amid such scenes, as though wandering over a new planet. The sky is without a 
speck —the vast landscape without an undulation. All around bears the original impress of nature untouched by human hand 
since its first formation. One boundless expanse spread out on every side until it meets the horizon, here and there only is 
broken by solitary clumps of stately mokaalas, flourishing near some Scanty reservoir—the countless variety of wild flowers 
which blossom spontaneously over tracts of land, otherwise bare and barren, affording in their rich colours, a singular 
contrast to the uniform sterility of the soil from which they have been called up, as by a touch of the magician’s 
wand, 
Advance, and for whole days together the traveller shall see no man, neither shall he hear aught save the strange 
notes of desert-loving animals—the aboriginal, and often the only inhabitants of the soil. At each step the elegant Korhaan* 
popping its black top-knot above the grass, rises with hoarse raven-like croaks before the horse's feet, and squeaking forth its 
monotonous kirra kirr kac, again alights a few yards beyond. Vast herds of quaint-looking autelopes, the offspring as it were 
of a second creation, are eyerywhere exhibiting their gaudy coats in endless variety of shade and hue. Hundreds are licking 
up the crystalized efflorescence, over which dances the dazzling and treacherous mirage, whilst large troops in the performance 
of their complicated manceuvres are absolutely forming, by their incessant tramp, roads which resemble so many well-traveled 
highways ! ¥ 
Through flowery champaigns roam these joyous creatures 
Of many a colour, size and shape—all graceful 
In every look, step, attitude, prepared 
Even at the shadow of a cloud to vanish, 
And leave a solitude where thousands stood 
With heads declined, and nibbling eagerly ; 
As locusts when they light on some new soil 
And move no more till they have shorn it bare. 
Until we had reached the head-quarters of the Bontebok, in the heart of these great unexplored plains, whereon thou- 
sands upon thousands were seen, and numbers daily slain—one small troop near Kapain, and half a dozen stragglers at the 
foot of the Cashan range, were all that occurred after the first specimens which we met with on the Chooi desert, These 
latter appeared to have been attracted by an oasis, containing the only moisture that we were fortunate enough to discover 
on that ‘region of emptiness,’ after a weary search of six and thirty hours, the greater number of which had been passed by 
the oxen in the yoke, Throughout, the features of this waste and howling wilderness, were those of a land accursed — 
Like burnish’d steel 
Glowing, it lay beneath the eye of noon, 
exhibiting one dreary expanse which seemed as if it had been for ages consecrated to drought, desolation, and sterility. Bare 
stony ridges, glaring worse than the heated hills of Pandemonium, crossed the forbidding landscape at long intervals, and the 
parched earth, rent and seamed with gaping fissures, was devoid of even a single spot of verdure, its Scanty vegetation being 
scorched to one uniform brown. Not a solitary tree raised its sickly head to diminish the aspect of barrenness, and the sun, 
like a ball of metal at a white heat, blazed over the nakedness. 
* Otis Afer. The Florican, 
