“If you travel through the Karroo in February,” he said, “you must expect to find it sultry. You will have to keep the shutters closed on the sunny side.”
“But that shuts out the view,” she objected. “I’m just loving this. I never imagined anything so desolate and grand and inspiring.”
“It’s desolate enough,” he admitted, glancing through the window out on the wide scene.
They were in the heart of the Karroo now. The arid sandy soil was sparsely covered with scrub and stunted mimosa bushes, and at intervals low hills sprang unexpectedly to the view, giving the effect of dark excrescences on the flat face of the land. Nothing green was visible; everywhere the eye rested on parched, powdered soil and dry scrub, beneath a brazen sky of hard, relentless blue.
They opened their baskets and broke their fast. Pamela was frankly hungry; the clear light air of the Karroo stimulates the appetite; and this early morning breakfast, with the warm sunlight streaming in through the windows, with the light warm breeze on her face, stirring the hair at her temples, was a new experience. She felt as she had felt on the previous night, alive in every nerve and centre of her being,—alert with the instinct of sheer gladness and joy in life; keenly appreciative of each fresh sensation, each fresh aspect in the constantly changing landscape as it unfolded itself to the view.
The stark barrenness of these vast tracks of no man’s land appealed to her senses acutely, stirred the imagination; contrasting sombrely with the greater fertility which occasionally started up amid the desolation, emphasising the sterility of the great plain which nursed these oases in its bare bosom, and supplied them from sources denied itself. Here, where the land was richer, where the rivers, dry at this season, had their beds between wooded banks, were to be seen small isolated groups of native huts, reed thatched, and patched with sacking and pieces of tin; and little naked piccaninnies ran forward to meet the train, and danced and shrieked excitedly, holding out little dark supplicating hands in greedy anticipation. Pamela snatched a handful of fruit and threw it to them, and leaning from the window, watched the eager race of these children of the sun who scampered to get the prize.
“They are just sweet,” she said, laughing.
“At a distance, yes,” agreed Dare. “They are characteristic of the country anyway—healthy, untrammelled, uncivilised.”
He got up and leaned from the window beside her. They had left the fertility behind. The ground became more stony, more strikingly naked. The railway wound in and out among the hills,—brown hills, covered with scrub, and strewn with huge boulders. There was no sight of a tree or of any living thing. The wind blew fitfully and more strongly; hot breaths of it were wafted in their faces, carrying with it a fine red grit which made the eyes sore.
Dare watched the eager, intent face with a slightly amused smile. Pamela’s keen enjoyment of everything reduced the discomfort of the long tiring journey to a minimum. She was making of it a picnic, and he was glad to fall in with her mood.