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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: stew-pan--and when I was there that March, which, of course, is autumn
in this part of Africa, the whole place reeked of fever. Every morning,
as I trekked along down by the Oliphant River, I used to creep from the
waggon at dawn and look out. But there was no river to be seen--only a
long line of billows of what looked like the finest cotton wool tossed
up lightly with a pitchfork. It was the fever mist. Out from among the
scrub, too, came little spirals of vapour, as though there were hundreds
of tiny fires alight in it--reek rising from thousands of tons of
rotting vegetation. It was a beautiful place, but the beauty was the
beauty of death; and all those lines and blots of vapour wrote one great
word across the surface of the country, and that word was 'fever.'
Long Odds |
