South Africa is at once a tropical garden, a waterless desert, a fertile plain, and a mountainous wilderness. It has all the distinctions of soil, climate, and physical features that are to be found anywhere in the world, and yet in three hundred years less than half a million persons have found its variety agreeable enough to become permanent residents. Along the coast country, for one hundred miles inland, the territory is as fertile as any in the world, the climate salubrious, and the conditions for settlement most agreeable. Beyond that line is another area of several hundred miles which consists chiefly of lofty tablelike plateaus and forest-covered mountains.
Farther inland is the Great Karroo, a desert of sombre renown, and beyond that the great rolling plains of the Kimberley region, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal. Here, during the dry season, the earth is covered with brown, lifeless grass, the rays of the sun beat down perpendicularly, and great clouds of yellow dust obscure the horizon. No trees or bushes are seen in a half-thousand-mile journey, the great broad rivers are waterless, and the only live objects are the lone Boer herders and their thirsty flocks.
A month later the rainy season may commence, and then the landscape becomes more animated. Rains, compared with which the heaviest precipitations of the north temperate zone are mere drizzles, continue almost incessantly for weeks; the plain becomes a tropical garden, and the traveller sees some reasons for that part of the earth's creation.
In the midst of these plains, and a thousand miles from the Cape of Good Hope, are the gold mines of the Randt, richer than California and more valuable than the Klondike. The wonder is that they were ever discovered, and almost as marvellous is it that any one should remain there sufficiently long to dig a thousand feet below the surface to secure the hidden wealth. Farther north are the undeveloped countries, Mashonaland and Matabeleland, the great lakes, and the relics of the civilization that is a thousand years older than ours.
According to the American standard, the most uninhabitable part of South Africa is the Transvaal, that inland territory of sun and plain, which has its only redeeming feature in its underground wealth. Had Nature placed her golden treasure in the worthless Kalahari Desert, it would have been of easier access than in the Transvaal, and worthy of a plausible excuse. But, excluding the question of gold, no one except the oppressed Boers ever had the weakest reason for settling in countries so unnatural, unattractive, and generally unproductive as the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.