STORMBERG JUNCTION.

The wind screams down from the naked hills on to the little junction station.  A platform with dining-room and telegraph office, a few corrugated iron sheds, the station-master’s corrugated iron bungalow—­and there is nothing else of Stormberg but veldt and, kopje, wind and sky.  Only these last day’s there has sprung up a little patch of white tents a quarter of a mile from the station, and about them move men in putties and khaki.  Signal flags blink from the rises, pickets with fixed bayonets dot the ridges, mounted men in couples patrol the plain and the dip and the slope.  Four companies of the Berkshire Regiment and the mounted infantry section—­in all they may count 400 men.  Fifty miles north is the Orange river, and beyond it, maybe by now this side of it, thousands of armed and mounted burghers—­and war.

I wonder if it is all real?  By the clock I have been travelling something over forty hours in South Africa, but it might just as well be a minute or a lifetime.  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.  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.  You are ever pulling up an incline between hills, making for a corner round one of the ranges.  You feel that when you get round that corner you will at last see something:  you arrive and only see another incline, two more ranges, and another corner—­surely this time with something to arrive at beyond.  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.  Every other colour meets others in harmony—­tawny sand, silver-grey scrub, crimson-tufted flowers like heather, black ribs of rock, puce shoots of screes, violet mountains in the middle distance, blue fairy battlements guarding the horizon.  And above all broods the intense purity of the South African azure—­not a coloured thing, like the plants and the hills, but sheer colour existing by and for itself.