"What was that?" asked Peter, under her spell, for she was speaking like a woman in a dream.
"It was one day when we were marching. We came on a glade among the trees, and at the end of it, a little depression of damp green grass, only the grass was quite hidden beneath a sheet of blue—such blue, I can't describe it—that quivered and moved in the sun. We stood quite still, and then a boy threw a little stone. And the blue all rose in the air, silently, like magic. It was a swarm of hundreds and hundreds of blue butterflies, Peter. Do you know what I did? I cried—I couldn't help it. It was too beautiful to see, Peter."
A little silence fell between them. She broke it in another tone.
"And the natives—I love the natives. I just love the all but naked girls carrying the water up to the village in the evening, tall and straight, like Greek statues; and the men, in a string of beads and a spear. I wanted to go naked myself there—at least, I did till one day I tried it, and the sun skinned me in no time. But at least one needn't wear much—cool loose things, and it doesn't matter what one does or says."
Peter laughed. "Who was with you when you tried the experiment?" he demanded.
Julie threw her head back, and even the professional four glanced up and looked at her. "Ah, wouldn't you like to know?" she laughed. "Well, I won't tease you—two native girls if you want to know, that was all. The rest of the party were having a midday sleep. But I never can sleep at midday. I don't mind lying in a hammock or a deck-chair, and reading, but I can't sleep. One feels so beastly when one wakes up, doesn't one?"
Peter nodded, but steered her back. "Tell me more," he said. "You wake something up in me; I feel as if I was born to be there."
"Well," she said reflectively, "I don't know that anything can beat the great range that runs along our border in Natal. It's different, of course, but it's very wonderful. There's one pass I know—see here, you go up a wide valley with a stream that runs in and out, and that you have to cross again and again until it narrows and narrows to a small footpath between great kranzes. At first there are queer stunted trees and bushes about, with the stream, that's now a tiny thing of clear water, singing among them, and there the trees stop, and you climb up and up among the boulders, until you think you can do no more, and at the last you come out on the top."
"And then?"
"You're in wonderland. Before you lies peak on peak, grass-grown and rocky, so clear in the rare, still air. There is nothing there but mountain and rock and grass, and the blue sky, with perhaps little clouds being blown across it, and a wind that's cool and vast—you feel it fills everything. And you look down the way you've come, and there's all Natal spread out at your feet like a tiny picture, lands and woods and rivers, till it's lost in the mist of the distance."