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Updated: June 11, 2025
Now we were climbing the vast desert of the Karroo, the dusty stairway that leads on to the highlands of South Africa. Once you have seen one desert, all the others are like it; and yet once you have loved the desert, each is lovable in a new way. In the Karroo you seem to be going up a winding ascent, like the ramps that lead to an Indian fortress.
The youth had been trained to observe from earliest childhood, and, having been born and bred on the karroo, he was as well skilled in tracking the footprints of animals and men as any red savage of the North American wilderness. He took care to keep the Hottentot in sight, however, the night being too dark to see footprints. Lithe and agile as a panther, he found no difficulty in doing so.
"Johnny," said Hobson, as we cantered along by the side of the little stream which caused a strip of bright fertility to wind like a green-snake over the brown Karroo, and which was, as it were, the life-blood of the farm, "Johnny, I want you to go to the nest and count the eggs, while I keep David in play." "Very well, father."
This bright and fruitful gem, in the midst of the brown and apparently barren karroo, was chiefly due to the existence of a large enclosure or dam which the thrifty farmer had constructed about half a mile from the homestead, and the clear waters of which shimmered in the centre of the picture, even when prolonged drought had quite dried up the bed of its parent stream.
"Well met, I say again, whether we be friends or foes," returned Considine still more heartily, "for if we be friends we shall fraternise; if we be foes we shall fight, and I would rather fight you for love, hate, or fun, than die of starvation in the karroo." "What is your name, and where do you come from?" demanded the stranger. "One question at a time, if you please," answered the youth.
But these things I had seen on the southern Karroo. It was not my eyes alone that told me the old secret, the same old secret that I had known. I knew then, and at once, as an infinite peace poured over me, that all my senses were required to bring me back to nature, and that one alone was helpless. Now with what I saw came what I heard.
Yet, though the Karroo looks a hopeless wilderness, flocks of sheep at distant intervals one sheep requires six hundred acres of this scrappy pasture for nourishment manage to subsist; and in consequence, now and again the traveller sees some far-off farm. We look about eagerly for signs of war. Little is as yet to be seen, and the Karroo remains unsympathetic.
If railways ran over the Karroo, adventurous capitalists would come from all ends of the earth to see it; they would buy land when they found a convenient mode of running their produce to the markets of the large towns and the ports on the coast; they would start ostrich farms and breed horses, and grow wool, and build mighty dams, and sink artesian wells, as the French have done with some success I believe in Algiers.
Just before their arrival at this point, the old waggons, with the drivers who had accompanied them from Algoa Bay, were exchanged for fresh teams and men, and here Ruyter, Jemalee, and Booby left them, to proceed over a spur of one of the mountain ranges to Jan Smit's farm on the karroo.
It is a minute of experience prolonged to a lifetime. South Africa is a dream one of those dreams in which you live years in the instant of waking a dream of distance. Departing from Capetown by night, I awoke in the Karroo. Between nine and six in the morning we had made less than a hundred and eighty miles.
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