Straggling over this plain ran the quaint ranges of flat-topped hummocks and pointed spitz-kopjes, streaked with ragged ravines torn by the floods, but utterly parched for most of the year. Shy meerkats (Cynictis penicillata), weasel-like creatures with furry coats, peered cautiously from their burrows at the strange procession of fortune-hunters, and from myriads of the mammoth ant-hills that dot the face of the desert innumerable legions of ants swarmed on the sand along the track of the wagons. Sometimes at nightfall the queer aard-vark lurked upon the ant-heap and licked up the crawling insects by thousands. Far over the heads of the travellers soared the predatory eagles and swooping hawks, harrying the pigeons and dwarf doves that clustered at daybreak to drink at the edge of every stagnant pool.
Even in the earliest years of the Dutch advance into South Africa, when wild beasts browsed in troops on every grassy plain and valley, and the poorest marksman could kill game almost at will, the karroo was shunned by almost every living creature except in the fickle season of rainfall. The lion skirted the desert-edge warily, unwilling to venture far from a certain water-brook or pool. There was nothing on the bare karroo to tempt the rhinoceros from his bed in green-leaved thickets, and only the wild-roaming antelopes (trekbok) rambled for pasturage far over the sparsely coated and parched desert waste. If this was true in the days when the tip of Africa was swarming with animal life, it is not surprising that the diamond-seekers in 1869 and 1870 rarely saw any living mark for their rifles when they journeyed over the desert. Rock-rabbits, akin to the scriptural coney, scampering to their holes, were often the largest game in sight for days at a time, and it was counted remarkable luck when any hunter put a bullet through a little brown antelope, a grysbok or springbok. The springboks still haunted the Great Karroo, for they were particularly fond of its stunted bush-growth, and in the rainy season many droves of these antelopes could be seen browsing warily or flying in panic from the spring of the cheetah, the African hunting leopard; but most of the bigger game, blesbok, hartebeest, koodoo, and wildebeest, that used to feed greedily on the same pasture, had been killed or driven away by the keen hunting of the years that followed the taking of the Cape by the English.
Sometimes the clear sky of the horizon was blurred by the advancing of monstrous swarms of locusts, the "black snow storms" of the natives, sweeping over the face of the land like the scourge of devouring flames, chased by myriads of locust-birds, and coating the ground for miles around at nightfall with a crawling, heaving coverlet. Then might be heard the hoarse trump of the cranes winging their way over the desert and dropping on the field strewn with locusts to gorge on their insect prey. Or the travellers saw the slate-white secretary bird, stalking about with his self-satisfied strut and scraping up mouthfuls with his eagle-like bill.
More marvellous than the locust clouds were the amazing mirages that deceived even the keen-eyed ostriches with their counterfeit lakes and wood-fringed streams, so temptingly near, but so provokingly receding, like the fruits hanging over Tantalus. Sometimes hilltops were reared high above the horizon, distorted to mountainous size and melting suddenly in thin air or a flying blur. Now a solitary horseman was seen to swoop over the desert in the form of a mammoth bird, or a troop of antelopes were changed to charging cavalry. No trick of illusion and transformation was beyond the conjuring power of the flickering atmosphere charged with the radiating heat of the desert.
“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own.”
– 1 Corinthians 6:19