The Leopard Woman

And yet details were interesting. The vast shallow cup to the horizon became a plainsparsely grown with flat-topped thorn trees. It was not a forest, yet neither was it opencountry. The eye penetrated the thin screen of tree trunks to the distance of half a mile ormore, but was brought to a stop at last. Underfoot was hard-baked earth, covered byirregular patches of shale that tinkled when stepped on. Well-defined paths, innumerable, trodden deep and hard, cut into the iron soil. They nearly all ran in a northwesterlydirection. The few traversing paths took a long slant. These paths, so exactly like thosecrossing a village green, had in all probability never been trodden by human foot. They hadbeen made by the game animals, the swarming multitudinous game of Central Africa