fortress. You are ever pulling up an incline between hills, making for a
corner round one of the ranges. You feel that when you get round that
corner you will at last see something: you arrive and only see another
incline, two more ranges, and another corner--surely this time with
something to arrive at beyond. You arrive and arrive, and once more you
arrive--and once more you see the same vast nothing you are coming from.
Believe it or not, that is the very charm of a desert--the unfenced
emptiness, the space, the freedom, the unbroken arch of the sky. It is
for ever fooling you, and yet you for ever pursue it. And then it is
only to the eye that cannot do without green that the Karroo is
unbeautiful. Every other colour meets others in harmony--tawny sand,
silver-grey scrub, crimson-tufted flowers like heather, black ribs of
rock, puce shoots of screes, violet mountains in the middle distance,
blue fairy battlements guarding the horizon. And above all broods the
intense purity of the South African azure--not a coloured thing, like
the plants and the hills, but sheer colour existing by and for itself.

It is sheer witching desert for five hundred miles, and for aught I know
five hundred miles after that. At the rare stations you see perhaps one
corrugated-iron store, perhaps a score of little stone houses with a
couple of churches. The land carries little enough stock--here a dozen
goats browsing on the withered sticks goats love, there a dozen
ostriches, high-stepping, supercilious heads in air, wheeling like a
troop of cavalry and trotting out of the stink of that beastly train. Of
men, nothing--only here at the bridge a couple of tents, there at the
culvert a black man, grotesque in sombrero and patched trousers,
loafing, hands in pockets, lazy pipe in mouth. The last man in the
world, you would have said, to suggest glorious war--yet war he meant
and nothing else. On the line from Capetown--that single track through
five hundred miles of desert--hang Kimberley and Mafeking and Rhodesia: