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On the farm they would have been living beings to me; but here, where there were so many people about me, I wanted some one to belong to me. I was lonely. I wanted something that was flesh and blood. Once on this farm there came a stranger; I did not ask his name, but he sat among the karoo and talked with me.
So many months of weariness and pain while bones and muscles were shaped within; so many hours of anguish and struggle that breath might be; so many baby mouths drawing life at woman's breasts; all this, that men might lie with glazed eyeballs, and swollen bodies, and fixed, blue, unclosed mouths, and great limbs tossed this, that an acre of ground might be manured with human flesh, that next year's grass or poppies or karoo bushes may spring up greener and redder, where they have lain, or that the sand of a plain may have a glint of white bones!"
All this was circulated to soothe; but it failed abjectly in its purpose. We were not to be fooled "the whole of the time," by cant about flying Columns whose wings, like those of Icarus, were only too likely to get detached in the heat of the Karoo.
"That first morning, when I sat in the front and called to my oxen, and saw nothing about me but the hills, with the blue coming down to them, and the karoo bushes, I was drunk; I laughed; my heart was beating till it hurt me. I shut my eyes tight, that when I opened them I might see there were no shelves about me.
Their isolation suggests battle with element and soil. The country immediately around Capetown is a paradise of fruit and flowers, but as you travel northward the whole character changes. There is less green and more brown. After the Karoo comes the equally famous veldt, studded with the kopjes that became a part of the world vocabulary with the Boer War.
Oh, would it not be more worship of Him to sit alone in the karoo and kiss one little purple flower that he had made? Is it not mockery? Then the thought comes, "What doest thou here, Elijah?" We who judge, what are we better than they? rather worse. Is it any excuse to say, "I am but a child and must come?" Does God allow any soul to step in between the spirit he made and himself?
Nowhere do the wild roses seem so pure, or are the aloes so jaunty and so gay. The smell of the karoo bush is sweeter than attar, and the bog-myrtle and mimosa, where they shelter a house or fringe a river, have a look of Arcady.
All day the train has been traversing the Karoo, a desert seamed by bare rocky mountains, and without a sign of life on it, only vast stretches of pebbly soil, dotted sparsely with dusty-green dwarf scrub. But to go back. We started yesterday. All went smoothly and simply.
He knew what the Karoo was now, even if he had not seen a Boer roll over like a rabbit, or heard the whine of flying bullets. This pestilence had sneaked on him before he had smelled powder. A thirsty day and a rash drink, or perhaps a tainted fruit who knew?
They would have been terrified by them; for they were calculated to produce such an effect upon any one to whose ears they were new. But Von Bloom and his family had lived too long upon the wild karoo to be ignorant of those voices. In the howling, and chattering, and yelping, they heard but the cries of the jackal; and they well knew the maniac laugh of the hideous hyena.
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