... And now we turn to nature. All these years we have lived beside
her, and we have never seen her; now we open our eyes and look at her.
The rocks have been to us a blur of brown; we bend over them, and
the disorganized masses dissolve into a many-colored, many-shaped,
carefully arranged form of existence. Here masses of rainbow-tinted
crystals, half-fused together; there bands of smooth gray methodically
overlying each other. This rock here is covered with a delicate silvery
tracery in some mineral, resembling leaves and branches; there on the
flat stone, on which we so often have sat to weep and pray, we look
down, and see it covered with the fossil footprints of great birds, and
the beautiful skeleton of a fish. We have often tried to picture in our
mind what the fossilized remains of creatures must be like, and all the
while we sat on them. We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling
that we have never seen the world.
The flat plain has been to us a reach of monotonous red. We look at
it, and every handful of sand starts into life. That wonderful people,
the ants, we learn to know; see them make war and peace, play and
work, and build their huge palaces. And that smaller people we make
acquaintance with, who live in the flowers. The citto flower had been
for us a mere blur of yellow; we find its heart composed of a hundred
perfect flowers, the homes of the tiny black people with red stripes,
who moved in and out in that little yellow city. Every bluebell has
its inhabitant. Every day the karroo (plain) shows up a new wonder
sleeping in its teeming bosom. On our way we pause and stand to see the
ground-spider make its trap, bury itself in the sand, and then wait
for the falling in of its enemy. Farther on walks a horned beetle, and
near him starts open the door of a spider, who peeps out carefully,
and quickly puts it down again. On a karroo-bush a green fly is laying
her silver eggs. We carry them home, and see the shells pierced, the
spotted grub come out, turn to a green fly, and flit away. We are
not satisfied with what nature shows us, and will see something for
ourselves. Under the white hen we put a dozen eggs, and break one
daily to see the white spot wax into the chicken. We are not excited
or enthusiastic about it; but a man is not to lay his throat open, he
must think of something. So we plant seeds in rows on our dam-wall,
and pull one up daily to see how it goes with them. Alladeen buried her
wonderful stone, and a golden palace sprang up at her feet. We do far
more. We put a brown seed in the earth, and a living thing starts out,
starts upward--why, no more than Alladeen can we say--starts upward,
and does not desist till it is higher than our heads, sparkling with
dew in the early morning, glittering with yellow blossoms, shaking
brown seeds with little embryo souls on to the ground. We look at it
solemnly, from the time it consists of two leaves peeping above the
ground and a soft white root, till we have to raise our faces to look
at it; but we find no reason for that upward starting.
A fowl drowns itself in our dam. We take it out, and open it on
the bank, and kneel, looking at it. Above are the organs divided
by delicate tissues; below are the intestines artistically curved
in a spiral form, and each tier covered by a delicate network of
blood-vessels standing out red against the faint blue background. Each
branch of the blood-vessels is comprised of a trunk, bifurcating into
the most delicate hair-like threads, symmetrically arranged.... Of that
same exact shape and outline is our thorn-tree seen against the sky in
mid-winter; of that shape also is delicate metallic tracery between our
rocks; in that exact path does our water flow when without a furrow we
lead it from the dam; so shaped are the antlers of the horned beetle.
How are these things related that such deep union should exist between
them all? Is it chance? Or, are they not all the fine branches of one
trunk, whose sap flows through us all?
... And so it comes to pass, in time, that the earth ceases for us to
be a weltering chaos. We walk in the great hall of life, looking up
and around reverentially. Nothing is despicable--all is meaning--full;
nothing is small--all is part of a whole, whose beginning and end we
know not. The life that throbs in us is a pulsation from it; too mighty
for our comprehension, not too small.--_Story of an African Farm._