rough-dried sweating horses with wisps of precious forage; the sun dipped behind the hills, and they heard the whistle of a train from the south. “What’s that?” said the Major, slipping into his coat. The decencies had not yet left him. “Ambulance train,” said the Captain of Mounted Infantry, raising his glasses. “I’d 30like to talk to a woman again, but it won’t stop here.... It is stopping, though, and making a beastly noise. Let’s look.” 30 The engine had sprung a leaky tube, and ran lamely into the siding. It would be two or three hours at least before she could be patched up. Two doctors and a couple of Nursing Sisters stood on the rear platform of a carriage. The Major explained the situation, and invited them to tea. “We were just going to ask you,” said the medical Major of the ambulance train. “No, come to our camp. Let the men see a woman again!” he pleaded. Sister Dorothy, old in the needs of war, for all her twenty-four years, gathered up a tin of biscuits and some bread and butter new cut by the orderlies. Sister Margaret picked up the tea-pot, the spirit-lamp, and a water-bottle. “Capetown water,” she said with a nod. “Filtered too. I know Karroo water.” She jumped down lightly on to the ballast. “What do you know about the Karroo, Sister?” said the Captain of Mounted Infantry, indulgently, as a veteran of a month’s standing. He understood that all 31that desert as it seemed to him was called by that name. 31 She laughed. “This is my home. I was born out they-ah—just behind that big range of hills—out Oudtshorn way. It’s only sixty miles from here. Oh, how good it is!” She slipped the Nurses’ cap from her head, tossed it through the open car-window, and drew a breath of deep content. With the sinking of the sun the dry hills had taken life and glowed against the green of the horizon. They rose up like jewels in the utterly clear air, while the valleys between flooded with purple shadow. A mile away, stark-clear, withered rocks showed as though one could touch them with the hand, and the voice of a native herdboy in charge of a flock of sheep came in clear and sharp over twice that distance. Sister Margaret devoured the huge
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