We rested one day high up in the Rockies, to visit a lake carved out of pure jade, whose property is to colour every reflection on its bosom to its own tint.  A belt of brown dead timber on a gravel scar, showed, upside down, like sombre cypresses rising from green turf and the reflected snows were pale green.  In summer many tourists go there, but we saw nothing except the wonderworking lake lying mute in its circle of forest, where red and orange lichens grew among grey and blue moss, and we heard nothing except the noise of its outfall hurrying through a jam of bone-white logs.  The thing might have belonged to Tibet or some unexplored valley behind Kin-chinjunga.  It had no concern with the West.

As we drove along the narrow hill-road a piebald pack-pony with a china-blue eye came round a bend, followed by two women, black-haired, bare-headed, wearing beadwork squaw-jackets, and riding straddle.  A string of pack-ponies trotted through the pines behind them.

‘Indians on the move?’ said I.  ‘How characteristic!’

As the women jolted by, one of them very slightly turned her eyes, and they were, past any doubt, the comprehending equal eyes of the civilised white woman which moved in that berry-brown face.

‘Yes,’ said our driver, when the cavalcade had navigated the next curve,’ that’ll be Mrs. So-and-So and Miss So-and-So.  They mostly camp hereabout for three months every year.  I reckon they’re coming in to the railroad before the snow falls.’

‘And whereabout do they go?’ I asked.

’Oh, all about anywheres.  If you mean where they come from just now—­that’s the trail yonder.’

He pointed to a hair-crack across the face of a mountain, and I took his word for it that it was a safe pony-trail.  The same evening, at an hotel of all the luxuries, a slight woman in a very pretty evening frock was turning over photographs, and the eyes beneath the strictly-arranged hair were the eyes of the woman in the beadwork jacket who had quirted the piebald pack-pony past our buggy.

Praised be Allah for the diversity of His creatures!  But do you know any other country where two women could go out for a three months’ trek and shoot in perfect comfort and safety?

These mountains are only ten days from London, and people more and more use them for pleasure-grounds.  Other and most unthought-of persons buy little fruit-farms in British Columbia as an excuse for a yearly visit to the beautiful land, and they tempt yet more people from England.  This is apart from the regular tide of emigration, and serves to make the land known.  If you asked a State-owned railway to gamble on the chance of drawing tourists, the Commissioner of Railways would prove to you that the experiment could never succeed, and that it was wrong to risk the taxpayers’ money in erecting first-class hotels.  Yet South Africa could, even now, be made a tourists’ place—­if only the railroads and steamship lines had faith.