Page:Seven Years in South Africa v1.djvu/207

 the road a small dam was placed right across its bed, and formed one side of a pond.

From the Matheuspruit the road was in a wretched condition, and where it was not stony the soil was so soft that we were in momentary dread of sticking fast. On the evening of the 29th we reached the Jagdspruit.

The following morning was warm and bright, and the rising sun lighted up the eastern slopes of the Klerksdorp heights, some of which had a conical shape, and stood isolated and bare on the bank of the Schoenspruit, others being covered with bushes, and joined together in ridges. Between us and the hills lay a shallow depression, about two miles wide, that appeared to open into the narrow valley of the Schoenspruit a few miles lower down. We were told that Klerksdorp, the oldest settlement in the Transvaal, was close on the other side of a chain of hills that stretched right across our path.

Tempted by the genial weather I went out for a stroll on the plain, which afforded me ample scope for botanizing. Amongst other plants worth gathering I found a cinna growing rankly as a weed, bearing one or more brick-red or rose-coloured blossoms on stems that varied from four to ten inches in height. From a clump of bushes on the left I took a number of beetles, some small bright ones (Buprestidæ), some leaf-beetles (Chrysomelidæ), and some Longicorns (Cerambycidæ); also several black and yellow-spotted spiders, that, like our cross-spiders, had spun their webs from bush to Rh