Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/154

150 Mafeking has little of interest for the ordinary sightseer and nothing remains of its spectacular siege except a few banks on the flat plain showing where the trenches had been placed. The native 'staadt' contains some five thousand blacks living in huts and houses of sun-baked bricks and plaster, with occasional corrugated iron roofs. The special train only stopped here long enough to gather up those who had come by road from the Transvaal. All the following day was spent in running along over the brown veld, sometimes flat and bare, sometimes covered with thick bush, but generally rolling country dotted with trees and intersected here and there with the dry beds of

streams. At this season of the year the ground has become parched under the hot sun and long coarse dry grass covers the whole face of the country. A tree with a straight trunk is rarely visible and the twisted branches were devoid of foliage except where parasitic growths, frequently species of misletoemistletoe [sic], showed their bright green stems. All the way from Durban to the end of our ride, grass fires, started by the farmers to clear off the ground before the rains, were visible and often made the nights picturesque as they slowly burned their way in long lines over the plains and hills.

The standard South African railway gauge is forty-two inches, fourteen and a half inches less than the ordinary one. This is probably an economical width for the present needs of the country, but it introduces difficulties in the construction of comfortable sleeping