Page:Seven Years in South Africa v1.djvu/373

 but in the heart of South Africa, we should have concluded at once that we were looking upon some ancient churchyard; what we really saw were the ruins of a town, enclosed by a low stone wall. The guide whom Montsua had sent with us, in giving an account of the place, said that until the last few years it had been occupied by a branch of the Banquaketse, but that the son of the chief Mosilili, named Pilani, who was a friend of Sechele, the king of the Bakuenas, had with a number of his dependents left his father’s town and Khatsisive’s territory, and had settled in Sechele’s new district in Molopolole; whereupon Mosilili, an old ally of Khatsisive’s, finding his town half deserted, left the remainder of the residents in the lurch, and took up his abode near Kanya.

During a stroll that I took along the river, I came across some very pretty bits of scenery. The banks were high and thickly clothed with vegetation; and in the stream the slippery boulders, piled one above another, formed little cataracts and natural weirs that future settlers might well utilize, either for turning mills or irrigating meadows. In the thickets on the banks were flocks of horned guinea-fowl (Numida coronata), and in muddy places I saw distinct traces of otters and water-lizards.

At dinner-time we noticed on the over-hanging rocks a number of rock-rabbits, called “dossies” by the Boers. We started off for a chase. These creatures are the smallest of all extant pachydermata, and, on account of being so continually hunted by Rh