Crossword-Solution: MEERKAT 7 letters, 45 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 13

First the grey of the mountains, turning to brown, then the bare bronze rock giving way to a tumbled wilderness of boulders, where lizards lie in the sun, where the meerkat startles the gazelle.

Then a bird takes flight across the whitening air, another, and then another; the meerkat sits up and begs breakfast of the sun; lizards creep out upon the stones; a snake slides along obscenely foraging.

Affrighted birds, in fluttering bewilderment, swept and circled aimlessly through the air with strange, half-human cries; the jackal and the meerkat, the springbok and the rheebok, trembled where they stood, with heads uplifted, vaguely trying to realize the Thing which was breaking the peace of their world; useless horses which had been turned out of the armies of Boers and British galloped and stumbled and plunged into space in alarm; for they knew what was darkening the morning.

Parts of the South African veldt are dangerous to ride over because of meerkat holes, but the horses in that country are marvellously clever in avoiding them, if they are left alone.

The horse had been scared by one of the ordinary sights of the veldt--a sneaking jackal-- perhaps a meerkat--in short, anything moving will startle a horse in the dark, let alone one so thoroughly "in the dispositions" for panic as this one now was.