On the Heels of De Wet Author:Christiaan Rudolf De Wet Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 45 BEE-LINE TO BRITSTOWN. " Not bad for a green crush." The brigadier sat down on the edge of a great slab of rock to watch the baggage over the nek. It... more » was a typical South African nek. An execrable path winding over the saddle of a low range of tumbled ironstone. Just one of those ranges which force themselves with sheer effrontery out from the level of the plain. Loose sugar - loaf excrescences which stud the sea of prairie with a thousand flat-topped islets, and weave the monotony of landscape peculiar to this great continent. The rough post - cart track led down into a vast amphitheatre, so vast that Western Europe can furnish no parallel to it. Yet its counterparts are met and traversed every day by the countless Britishcolumns now slowly darning the gaping rent in Africa's robe of peace. Who, if they had not known, would have said that the beautiful panorama, which the morning sun now unveiled before us, was a theatre of war ? Away at our feet stretched mile upon mile of rolling Karoo and blue-grey prairie. True it was punctuated and ribbed with stunted kopjes. But still the everlasting plain predominated, until it was lost in an autumn haze which no sun could master. Immense,—a land without a horizon, a land every characteristic of which inspires a sense of independence and freedom. A sensation — an intoxication, to be felt, not to be described. Why should men fight in a land such as this ? Surely there is room for all! The very animals of the field, ignorant of the selfishness bred of a limited pasturage and restricted space, are docile and free of vice. But with man it is different. The dweller on the open plain learns freedom. The lesson of cramped cities is avarice —that the fittest may survive. Who shall blend the two ? There, as we stood with our loins girt f...« less