Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE VELDT AND ITS PEOPLE THE surface of the veldt where we fought under Methuen is a thousand miles of baked earth profusely littered with stones. Hills are flung all over it as if it had once boiled and these were the bubbles. These hills, called kopjes (copies) are from 100 to 1,000 feet high, and some are all speckled with sage brush, while others are mere heaps of boulders. Everything is khaki-coloured except the rocks, which are usually black. River-beds as dry as a bone in a furnace are very plentiful, and so are other smaller gutters called " sluits " where water flows in the rainy season. Water, the scarcest thing on the veldt, is a terrible danger there?a cruel, destructive force. When it is present, it is so abundant as to be useless and unmanageable; andthen it tears and rends its way, like a thing possessed of devils, into the sea, and is gone. A large part of this strange tract is called the Karroo Desert, and is inhabited by very few persons except the Kaffirs in their round huts of bent saplings covered with matting. These appear to be usually near the railway, and the men and women are seen to wear clothing as a homage to the white men, which is not paid where the negroes live in numbers by themselves. A bead- worked belt around the loins, and a very much abbreviated beginning of a breech-clout suffice to meet their own ideas of comfort and modesty. It was not so very long ago that in every well-to-do Boer house a perfectly nude Kaffir handmaiden of from fifteen to twenty-five years came into the sitz hammer or sitting-room to wash the feet of the men just before bedtime. She brought a basin, soap, and towel, and attended to the eldest guest first, then to the next in age, and so on to the family. To-day the custom is dead and the handmaiden i...