The day had been very hot even for the Transvaal, where the days still
know how to be hot in the autumn, although the neck of the summer is
broken--especially when the thunderstorms hold off for a week or two,
as they do occasionally. Even the succulent blue lilies--a variety of
the agapanthus which is so familiar to us in English greenhouses--hung
their long trumpet-shaped flowers and looked oppressed and miserable,
beneath the burning breath of the hot wind which had been blowing for
hours like the draught from a volcano. The grass, too, near the wide
roadway that stretched in a feeble and indeterminate fashion across
the veldt, forking, branching, and reuniting like the veins on a
lady's arm, was completely coated over with a thick layer of red dust.
But the hot wind was going down now, as it always does towards sunset.
Indeed, all that remained of it were a few strictly local and
miniature whirlwinds, which would suddenly spring up on the road
itself, and twist and twirl fiercely round, raising a mighty column of
dust fifty feet or more into the air, where it hung long after the
wind had passed, and then slowly dissolved as its particles floated to
the earth. Advancing along the road, in the immediate track of one of these
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