CHAPTER II.
KIMBERLEY AND THE JAMESON RAID "Ex Africa semper aliquid novi." In the last week of the old year we started on our journey to Kimberley, then a matter of thirty-six hours.

The whole of one day we dawdled over the Great Karroo in pelting rain and mist, which reminded one of Scotland.

This sandy desert was at that season covered with brown scrub, for it was yet too early for the rains to have made it green, and the only signs of life were a few ostriches, wild white goats, and, very rarely, a waggon piled with wood, drawn along the sandy road by ten or twelve donkeys.

As to vegetation, there were huge clumps of mimosa-bushes, just shedding their yellow blossoms, through which the branches showed up with their long white thorns, giving them a weird and withered appearance.

It must indeed have required great courage on behalf of the old Voor-trekker Boers, when they and their families left Cape Colony, at the time of the Great Trek, in long lines of white-tented waggons, to have penetrated through that dreary-waste in search of the promised land, of green veldt and running streams, which they had heard of, as lying away to the north, and eventually found in the Transvaal.