Even the air seemed red.

It looked as though earth and heaven had been steeped in blood; and, fresh as John was from the sight of the dead driver, his ears yet tingling with the tale of Bronker's Spruit, it is not to be wondered at that the suggestive sight oppressed him, seated in that lonely waste, with no company except the melancholy "_kakara-kakara_" of an old black _koran_ hidden away somewhere in the grass.

He was not much given to such reflections, but he did begin to wonder whether this was the last journey of all the many he had made during the past twenty years, and if for him a Boer bullet was about to solve the mystery of life and death.
Then he sank to the stage of depression that most people have made acquaintance with at some time or another, when a man begins to ask, "What is the use of it?
Why were we born?
What good do we do here?
Why should we--as the majority of mankind doubtless are--mere animals be laden up with sorrows till at last our poor backs break?
Is God powerful or powerless?
If powerful, why did He not let us sleep in peace, without setting us here to taste of every pain and mortification, to become acquainted with every grief, and then to perish miserably ?" Old questions these, which the sprightly critic justly condemns as morbid and futile, and not to be dangled before a merry world of make-believe.
Perhaps he is right.

It is better to play at marbles on a sepulchre than to lift the lid and peep inside.

But, for all that, they _will_ arise when we sit alone at even in our individual wildernesses, surrounded, perhaps, by mementoes of our broken hopes and tokens of our beloved dead, strewn about us like the bleaching bones of the wild game on the veldt, and in spirit watch the red sun of our existence sinking towards its vapoury horizon.