Page:Seven Years in South Africa v2.djvu/117

 After starting in the afternoon west by north towards the most northerly of the Klamaklenyana springs, we had to pass through a part of the forest, where we saw some fine camel-thorn acacias and mimosas; also some trees like maples, some mochononos, and bushes of fan-palms. The scenery remained very much of the same character all through the next morning’s march, until we reached the spring in time for our midday halt. Between the first and the last of the four springs, I counted twenty-five depressions in the ground that are all full of water after heavy rain.

As we came along, I made several little détours into the woods, and saw buffaloes, striped gnus, Zulu-hartebeests and zebras, and noticed that lion-tracks were by no means wanting. At a point near the spring, where a trader’s road brings them out from the western Matabele, I met three hunters, named Barber, Frank, and Wilkinson. Barber’s skill as a hunter was notorious; he had a mother who was not only a keen observer of animal life, but was so gifted with artistic power of delineating what she saw, that she had published several little works on the subject. Barber likewise showed me his own sketch-book, in which he had made some very clever illustrations of his hunting-adventures.

We went a few miles further before we stopped for the night. Some of the trees that we passed next morning were of remarkably well-developed growth, several of the trunks being sixty feet in height; they belonged to a species called wild syringa by the Dutch, and “motsha” by the Bamangwatos; there is another sort quite as common, which they call “monati.” Near the