Page:A Treasury of South African Poetry.djvu/177

Is heard by the fountain by twilight grey;
Where the zebra, wantonly tosses his mane,
With wild hoof scouring the desolate plain;
And the fleet-footed ostrich over the waste,
Speeds like a horseman who travels in haste,
Hieing away to the home of her rest,
Where she and her mate have scooped their nest,
Far hid from the pitiless plunderer's view
In the pathless depths of the parched Karoo.

Afar in the desert I love to ride,
With the silent Bush-boy alone by my side;
Away, away, in the wilderness vast,
Where the white man's foot hath never passed;
And the quivered Coránna or Bechuán
Hath rarely crossed with his roving clan;
A region of emptiness, howling and drear,
Which man hath abandoned from famine and fear;
Which the snake and the lizard inhabit alone,
With the twilight bat from the yawning stone;
Where grass, nor herb, nor shrub takes root,
Save poisonous thorns that pierce the foot;
And the bitter-melon, for food and drink,
Is the pilgrim's fare, by the salt lake's brink;
A region of drought, where no river glides,
Nor rippling brook with osiered sides;
Where sedgy pool, nor bubbling fount,
Nor tree, nor cloud, nor misty mount,
Appears to refresh the aching eye;
But the barren earth and the burning sky,
And the blank horizion, round and round,
Spreads, void of living sight and sound.
And here, while the night-winds round me sigh,