Long Bands
Of Slate Dark Clouds Lay Close Along The Horizon, And Behind Them
Glowed A Heart Of Fire, As On A Small Scale The Lamplight Glows
Through A Metal-Worked Shade.
On either side the sky was pale
green-blue, translucent and pure, deep as infinity itself.
The
earth was still black, and the top of the rise near at hand was
clear edged. On that edge, and by a strange chance accurately in
the centre of illumination, stood the uncouth massive form of a
shaggy wildebeeste, his head raised, staring to the east. He did
not move; nothing of that fire and black world moved; only
instant by instant it changed, swelling in glory toward some
climax until one expected at any moment a fanfare of trumpets,
the burst of triumphant culmination.
Then very far down in the distance a lion roared. The
wildebeeste, without moving, bellowed back an answer or a
defiance. Down in the hollow an ostrich boomed. Zebra barked, and
several birds chirped strongly. The tension was breaking not in
the expected fanfare and burst of triumphal music, but in a
manner instantly felt to be more fitting to what was indeed a
wonder, but a daily wonder for all that. At one and the same
instant the rim of the sun appeared and the wildebeeste, after
the sudden habit of his kind, made up his mind to go. He dropped
his head and came thundering down past us at full speed. Straight
to the west he headed, and so disappeared. We could hear the beat
of his hoofs dying into the distance. He had gone like a Warder
of the Morning whose task was finished. On the knife-edged
skyline appeared the silhouette of slim-legged little Tommies,
flirting their rails, sniffing at the dewy grass, dainty,
slender, confiding, the open-day antithesis of the tremendous and
awesome lord of the darkness that had roared its way to its lair,
and to the massive shaggy herald of morning that had thundered
down to the west.
III. THE CENTRAL PLATEAU
Now is required a special quality of the imagination, not in
myself, but in my readers, for it becomes necessary for them to
grasp the logic of a whole country in one mental effort. The
difficulties to me are very real. If I am to tell you it all in
detail, your mind becomes confused to the point of mingling the
ingredients of the description. The resultant mental picture is a
composite; it mixes localities wide apart; it comes out, like the
snake-creeper-swamp-forest thing of grammar-school South America,
an unreal and deceitful impression. If, on the other hand, I try
to give you a bird's-eye view-saying, here is plain, and there
follows upland, and yonder succeed mountains and hills-you lose
the sense of breadth and space and the toil of many days. The
feeling of onward outward extending distance is gone; and that
impression so indispensable to finite understanding-"here am I,
and what is beyond is to be measured by the length of my legs and
the toil of my days." You will not stop long enough on my plains
to realize their physical extent nor their influence on the human
soul.
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