Page:Papers presented to the Worlds Congress on Ornithology.djvu/198

 one yard high, and the slender stems of this high grass, waving to and fro in the northwesterly breeze, are interwoven with numerous blossoms, showing all the colors which form a rainbow’s beauty. Everywhere on the immense flat, bounded by the blue sky of the horizon only, whereto we turn our eyes, and plainly to be seen from the small hill, an elevation formed by the white alluvial karoo tuff-stone, herds of game are visible. Large troops of the blessbuck (Damalis albifrons) are quietly grazing; small herds of the black gnu (Connochxtes gnu) are here and there enjoying their circular runs, the latter to hunters known as “wildebeest dances.” But most numerous of all are the graceful springbucks, Antidorcas euchore, which in herds of hundreds in all directions are to be seen; many of them, unruly in their playfulness, leap up eight feet above the ground, bounding one over the other.

Among the antelopes and gnus, Cranes, single as well as in pairs and troops of fifty or more, are walking up and down, feeding upon the numerous locusts and upon the white ants—the nests of which latter, about two feet high and hemispherical, or in the form of tubes two to four feet high, are to be found in hundreds of thousands upon the Harts and Mo-lapo Spruit plains.

Just in front of us and down below in the grassy plains the dark waters of a large pool glisten and quiver in the reddish shine of the subsiding sun. In its centre, this being the orifice of an underground cave, common to the dark-gray dolomite formation of these plains, the pool is of very great depth; otherwise it is shallow in its greatest extent, and such places are overgrown with a thicket of tall, rustling reeds. One of these abodes forms truly a centre of bird-life in the immense plain, so large in extent as not to be overglanced by the human eye, not even from the elevated position which we are occupy-