When Mr. Joseph Chamberlain delivered his great
patriotic speech on the inferiority of England to the Dutch parts of South
Africa, he made use of the expression "the illimitable veldt." The word
"veldt" is Dutch, and the word "illimitable" is Double Dutch. But the
meditative statesman probably meant that the new plains gave him a sense
of largeness and dreariness which he had never found in England. Well,
if he never found it in England it was because he never looked for it in
England. In England there is an illimitable number of illimitable veldts.
I saw six or seven separate eternities in cresting as many different
hills. One cannot find anything more infinite than a finite horizon, free
and lonely and innocent. The Dutch veldt may be a little more desolate
than Birmingham. But I am sure it is not so desolate as that English hill
was, almost within a cannon-shot of High Wycombe.
I looked across a vast and voiceless valley straight at the moon, as if at
a round mirror. It may have been the blue moon of the proverb; for on
that freezing night the very moon seemed blue with cold. A deathly frost
fastened every branch and blade to its place. The sinking and softening
forests, powdered with a gray frost, fell away underneath me into an abyss
which seemed unfathomable.
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