Gordons, and Volunteers have pitched their own tents, and a terrible
time they are having of it. Dust is the curse of the place. We remember
the Long Valley as an Arcadian dell. Veterans of the Soudan recall the
black sand-storms with regretful sighs. The thin, red dust comes
everywhere, and never stops. It blinds your eyes, it stops your nose, it
scorches your throat till the invariable shilling for a little glass of
any liquid seems cheap as dirt. It turns the whitest shirt brown in half
an hour, it creeps into the works of your watch and your bowels. It lies
in a layer mixed with flies on the top of your rations. The white ants
eat away the flaps of the tents, and the men wake up covered with dust,
like children in a hayfield. Even mules die of it in convulsions. It was
in this land that the ostrich developed its world-renowned digestive
powers; and no wonder.

[Illustration: MAP OF LADYSMITH AND NEIGHBOURHOOD]

The camp stands on a barren plain, nearly two miles north-west of the
town--if we may so call the one straight road of stores and tin-roofed
bungalows. Low, flat-topped hills surround it, bare and rocky. But to
understand the country it is best to climb into the mountains of the
long Drakensberg, which forms the Free State frontier in a series of
strangely jagged and precipitous peaks, and at one place, by the
junction with Basutoland, runs up to 11,000 feet. Last Sunday I went
into the Free State through Van Reenen's Pass, over which a little
railway has been carried by zigzag "reverses." The summit is 5,500 feet
above the sea, or nearly 2,000 feet above Ladysmith. From the steep
slopes, in places almost as green as the Lowlands or Yorkshire fells, I
looked south-east far over Natal--a parched, brown land like the desert
beyond the Dead Sea, dusty bits of plain broken up by line upon line of
bare red mountain. It seemed a poor country to make a fuss about, yet as