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Updated: June 11, 2025
The author, having seen the mirage while riding on the karroo, writes from personal experience. In the heart of the wild mountain scenery of the frontier a grim-looking fort had been built to keep the Kafirs in check. It was named Fort Wilshire, and a truly warlike place it was, with its high walls and cannon, its red troops of the line, green rifles, and blue artillery.
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.
This fact was deduced from the presence of some zebras and pallahs, seen feeding near, as they knew that neither of those animals ever strays far from the neighbourhood of a stream. Near what may be called the border of the karroo, the hunters came across what to them was a prize of some value.
To the right the undulating karroo, covered with wild-flowers, and dotted with clumps of mimosa-bush, terminated abruptly in a lake which stretched away, in some places like a sea, to the horizon. Islands innumerable studded the smooth surface of this lake, and were reflected in its crystal depths.
Abel Slingsby, an impulsive youth, and a friend of Hans Marais, who had just been married to a pretty neighbour of Hans in the karroo, and was in Grahamstown on his honeymoon, declared that he would, without a moment's hesitation, throw up his farm and emigrate to Brazil, if things were not put right without delay.
I never heard of one being collared before, though a friend of mine whom I met on my last visit to the karroo used sometimes to catch hold of a snake by the tail, whirl it round his head, and dash its brains out against a tree." "You'll stay with us to-day, Dobson!" said Brook.
Now all these reflections could not but be profitless, possibly dangerous, yet they had this advantage they helped to kill time, and that during a thirty-odd-hour journey across the Karroo. Well, it is an advantage! On through the long, hot day, and still that memory was with him.
Leaning on the rail of the deserted bridge in the darkness and the silence it seemed as though I could see their ghosts standing amid the crosses on the hillside staring longingly across the world toward that sun-baked Karroo of Australia and to the blue New Zealand mountains which they called "Home."
He had no doubt but what they could be found on the following day; and, as it was necessary that the cattle should have a little time to rest and recover themselves after the toils of the karroo, an ostrich-hunt was at once agreed upon, and for that evening ostriches became the chief topic of conversation around the camp-fire.
Thereafter the garden had to be considerably enlarged, for the golden fruit created by the streams which had been collected and stored by Rivers, proved quite inadequate to the supply of those oceans of babies and swarms of Goldboys that flooded the karroo, and filled its solitudes with shouts and yells that would have done credit to the wildest tribe of reddest Kafirs in the land.
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