Guy felt for the moment
he had left Europe and its reminiscences now fairly behind him; in
this free new world, he was free once more himself; his shame was
cast aside; he could revel like the antelopes in the immensity of
a land where nobody knew him and he knew nobody.
What added most of all, however, to this quaint new sense of vastness
and freedom was the occasional appearance of naked blacks, roaming
at large through the burnt-up fields of which till lately they
had been undisputed possessors. Day after day Guy drove on along
the uncertain roads, past queer outlying towns of white wooden
houses--Cradock, and Middelburg, and Colesberg, and others--till
they crossed at last the boundary of Orange River into the Free
State, and halted for a while in the main street of Philippolis.
It was a dreary place; Guy began now to see the other side of South
Africa. Though he had left England in autumn, it was spring-time
at the Cape, and the winter drought had parched up all the grass,
leaving the bare red dust in the roads or streets as dry and desolate
as the sand of the desert. The town itself consisted of some sixty
melancholy and distressful houses, bare, square, and flat-roofed,
standing unenclosed along a dismal high-road, and with that
congenitally shabby look, in spite of their newness, which seems
to belong by nature to all southern buildings.
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