Her eyes, looking out from the shade of her helmet, dwelt with intense appreciation upon the shimmering landscape. All the wonder and the beauty and the richness of the plain, which appeared now but a blackened waste, was known to her. To the unobservant gaze the scene might wear the semblance of an arid desert; but to one familiar with it through the different seasons the drought-stricken sterility which held the veld in a relentless, strangling grip was but the period of waiting when the land rested in expectation of the coming gift of life. With the rains the richness concealed in her dry bosom would spring forth and blossom prodigally, and the desert would be a garden, teeming with life.
“Love of the land!” she repeated softly. And added, after a moment: “Have you ever breathed air so good as this?—so light and clear and dry? There’s health in every breath of it. One could see to the ends of the earth through air so pure and clear. There is health here, and freedom.”
“It is a savage land,” he said suddenly—“but it grips. It is the savagery which gets hold of one. I feel I want to tame it.”
She laughed, and pointed upward where a vulture with great wings outspread flew heavily in the blue, sensing its prey.
“Could you tame the aasvogel,” she asked, “till it ceases to be a carrion bird and eats from your hand? Could you teach the jackal to respect the lamb?—or the snake to forget its venom? I would hate to see this land subdued.”
He smiled at her enthusiasm. There was something in herself which, if not exactly savage, was at least untamed, he reflected. Without thinking she had quickened her horse’s pace. Matheson rode faster to keep up with her.
“I have disappointed you,” he said.
“Oh, no!” she contradicted quickly. “It wasn’t to be expected that you would feel as we do about the veld... But you see deeper than many Englishmen. You will love the land yet.”
He made no answer to this. Had he put his thoughts into words, they would have claimed to love the land already. It was amazing how surely and firmly it had got a hold on his imagination. It was not only with his arrival at the farm, he told himself, that he had felt this extraordinary influence; but since he had come to Benfontein he had acquired a new sympathy with, and a deeper understanding of, the country. Honor Krige was teaching him that, and other things.
He had set forth that morning to behold the beauty and the charm of the veld; and, insensibly, while he gazed upon this sun-scorched sameness, the mystery and the beauty of it were revealed to him. The translucent air, quivering in the sunlight like some glad and living thing, was wondrously soft and stimulating; eye and brain cleared with its magic healing; the mind became surprisingly alert and receptive of new impressions. The sandy soil lost its aridity, and disclosed numberless unsuspected shining beauties; it glittered as with many gems, and revealed in places unexpected shades and colours, and curious, infinitesimal insect-life creeping and pushing upon its white surface. The dry sluits and water-courses, proclaiming moisture where it would appear that moisture was unknown; the cairns of yellow stones, piled high in rude and strange formation; the yellow and red of the butterbloem, crude intense colours in an intense atmosphere under the hard blue of the sky; the occasional oddly-shaped kopjes; the distant oasis of some lonely farm; each struck a separate note of beauty in this strange, uncivilised scene—a beauty that was fearful and fiercely assertive, that crushed the senses, that again attracted and held surely by the unfailing magnetism of elemental and sincere things. And over all the parched nakedness of the land the sun flung its golden radiance, a yellow flame that quivered through the hot air and pierced into the earth.