a great dam in red sand beyond the graves. In the grey dawn before the
sheep are let out we work at it. All day, while the young ostriches we
tend feed about us, we work on through the fiercest heat. The people
wonder what new spirit has seized us now. They do not know we are working
for life. We bear the greatest stones, and feel a satisfaction when we
stagger under them, and are hurt by a pang that shoots through our chest.
While we eat our dinner we carry on baskets full of earth, as though the
devil drove us. The Kaffer servants have a story that at night a witch and
two white oxen come to help us. No wall, they say, could grow so quickly
under one man's hands.

At night, alone in our cabin, we sit no more brooding over the fire. What
should we think of now? All is emptiness. So we take the old arithmetic;
and the multiplication table, which with so much pains we learnt long ago
and forgot directly, we learn now in a few hours, and never forget again.
We take a strange satisfaction in working arithmetical problems. We pause
in our building to cover the stones with figures and calculations. We save
money for a Latin Grammar and Algebra, and carry them about in our pockets,
poring over them as over our Bible of old. We have thought we were utterly
stupid, incapable of remembering anything, of learning anything. Now we
find that all is easy. Has a new soul crept into this old body, that even
our intellectual faculties are changed? We marvel; not perceiving that
what a man expends in prayer and ecstasy he cannot have over for acquiring
knowledge. You never shed a tear, or create a beautiful image, or quiver
with emotion, but you pay for it at the practical, calculating end of your
nature. You have just so much force: when the one channel runs over the
other runs dry.

And now we turn to Nature. All these years we have lived beside her, and
we have never seen her; and now we open our eyes and look at her.