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296 "Jump on your pony, then, and ride down and meet them. Gently, man! Don't break your neck

Later on they sat out upon the veranda. The swift darkness was falling already upon the land, the colour was fading fast from the gorgeous fragments of piled-up clouds in the western sky. Almost as they watched, the outline faded away from the distant mountains, the rolling woods lost their shape.

"It's a wonderful country, yours, Duncan," Wrayson said.

"It is God's own country," Duncan answered quietly. "What we shall make of it, He only knows! It is the country of eternal mysteries."

He pointed northwards.

"Think," he said, "beneath those forests are the ruins of cities, magnificent in civilization and art before a stone of Babylon was built, when Nineveh was unknown. What a heritage! What a splendid heritage, if only we can prove ourselves worthy of it!"

"Why not?" Wrayson asked quietly. "Our day of decline is not yet. Even the historians admit that."

"It is the money-grabbers of the world who belittle empire," Duncan answered. "It is from the money-grabbers of the Transvaal that we have most to fear. Only those can know what Africa is, what it might mean to us, who shake the dust of civilization from their feet, and creep a little way into its heart. It is here in the quiet places that one begins to understand. One has the sense of coming into a virgin country, strong, fresh, and wonderful. Think of the race who might be bred here! They would rejuvenate the world!"

"And yet," the woman at his side murmured, the woman who had been a queen, "it is not a virgin country