A Vendetta of the Desert Part 17

Already the herds of famished game would be on the move, apprised by the lightning-sign of the falling of that rain which was to be their salvation:--springbucks,--flitting like ghosts under the late-risen moon; gemsbucks,--sore-footed from digging out with their hoofs the large tap-roots from which they get that supply of moisture that serves them in lieu of water to drink; hartebeests lumbering along with swift, ungainly stride, and other desert denizens in bewildering variety.

Hanging on the flanks of the horde might be seen the gaunt, hungry lions, seeking in vain to quench their raging thirst in the blood of their emaciated victims.

When Kanu found that Elsie had disappeared from where he had left her among the rocks and bushes at the foot of Table Mountain, he took to the veldt with the intention of getting as far from the dwellings of civilised men as possible. He knew that if he returned to Elandsfontein and told the van der Walts his remarkable story he would never be believed, and that the consequences would be distinctly unpleasant, if not fatal, to him. So he exercised the utmost wariness, taking great precautions against the possibility of being observed by day when seeking food. It will, of course, be understood that he travelled only by night. Being a Bushman of intelligence Kanu reflected upon many things in the course of his exciting and wearisome journey. In his untutored ignorance he cla.s.sified the Caucasian race arbitrarily into two categories,--the good and the bad. Elsie comprised within her own person the one category; all other Europeans fell into the other.

Cautiously feeling his way northward, Kanu made a wide detour to avoid pa.s.sing anywhere near the Tanqua Valley, and then wandered vaguely on in the hope of falling in with some of his own race. This hope was realised one morning in a somewhat startling manner. Following some tracks which he had discovered leading up the stony side of a very steep mountain, he suddenly found himself confronted by a number of pygmies such as himself; each, however, with a drawn bow and an arrow which Kanu knew was most certainly poisoned, trained upon him at point-blank range.

Kanu at once did what was the only proper thing to do under the circ.u.mstances,--he cried out in the Bushman tongue that he was a friend and a brother, and then fell flat on his face and lay, with extended arms, awaiting death or the signal to arise. Then he heard the warriors consulting together as to whether they should summarily despatch him or lead him captive to the cave in which they dwelt and kill him there for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the non-combatant members of the little community.

They decided in favour of the latter alternative and then Kanu knew that most probably his life would be spared.

But as yet he was not by any means out of the wood His vestiges of European clothing caused him to be suspected and, in the savage mind, suspicion and condemnation are not very far apart. Cases were familiar to all in which renegade sons of the desert had betrayed the hiding-places of their compatriots to their deadly enemies, the Boers, and it was quite possible that Kanu might turn out to be a traitor. But when the captive showed the unhealed stripes with which his back was still scored, the captors began to feel more kindly disposed towards him, and they eventually came to the conclusion that he was not a spy.

Later, when Kanu told his father's name, and related the circ.u.mstances of the raid which swept his family from the face of the earth and made him a bondman to the hated Boer,--and when it turned out that old Nalb, the patriarch of the party, had once seen a picture painted by Kanu's father who, though he had died comparatively young, had been a somewhat celebrated artist, the new arrival was accepted into full fellowship and made free of the cave and all its contents.

The Bushman acknowledged no chieftain, nor was he bound by any tribal ties. Each family was independent of every other family and hunted on its own account. The little community into which Kanu found himself adopted consisted of eight men, seven women and fourteen children of various ages. They lived after the manner of their kind,--absolutely from hand to mouth, taking no thought for the morrow. Their movements about the country were determined by accidents of weather and the chase, but they retired from time to time to their cave in the Kamiesbergen, whenever the advent.i.tious rains made the locality habitable. When they, or any of them, killed a large animal, they would not attempt to remove the meat, but would camp alongside the carcase and gorge until everything but the hair and the pulverised bones was finished. The family cave, besides being endeared by many a.s.sociations, had the advantage of being in the vicinity of a spring which, although its water was rather brackish, had never been known to give out completely in the severest drought.

The cave had another great advantage,--that of being surrounded on all sides by a wide belt of desert, so the pygmies were not at all likely to be disturbed by inconvenient callers. It was s.p.a.cious, and its walls were well adapted for the exercise of that remarkable art which the Bushman practised,--the art of painting. Here, on the wide natural panels were frescoed counterfeit presentments of men and all other animals with which the Bushmen were familiar, in more or less skilful outline. There was no attempt at anything like perspective, but some of the figures were drawn with spirit and showed considerable skill as well as an evident natural artistic faculty. The animals most frequently represented were the eland, the hartebeeste, the gemsbok and the baboon.

One picture was a battle-piece and represented a number of men being hurled over a cliff. This was old Nalb's handiwork, and was executed in commemoration of an attack by some strangers upon the ancestral cave, which was repulsed with great slaughter.

A few of the paintings were the work of itinerant artists, who sometimes, in seasons of plenty, wandered from cave to cave,--possibly in the interests of art,--even as Royal Academicians have found it necessary to visit the schools of Rome and Paris. Such paintings could be distinguished among the others by the hand-print of the artist in paint below each. They were usually somewhat better executed than the others, and often represented animals not common in the neighbourhood, but with whose proportions the artist had evidently familiarised himself in other and, perhaps, distant parts.

The paints used were ochres of different tints,--from white, ranging through several reds and browns, up to black. These were mixed with fat and with some vegetable substance to make the colours bite into the rock. Some of the most vivid tints were taken from those fossils known as coprolites, in which small kernels of ochreous substance are found to exist. The brush was made of the pinion feathers of small birds.

It was not long before Kanu rose to a position of eminence in the little clan. He took unto himself, as wife, Ksoa, a daughter of old Nalb and, when that venerable leader's physical vigour began to decline, Kanu gradually came to be looked upon as his probable successor. His sojourn among the Boers, whilst it had told against his skill as a hunter, had sharpened his wits generally. Soon he became as expert as any in the tracking of game. Then he introduced a slight improvement in the matter of fixing an arrow-head to the shaft, which was immediately recognised by the superst.i.tious Bushmen as an evidence of more than human ability.

Thus, when old Nalb met his death from thirst, after finding that the store of water-filled ostrich-eggsh.e.l.ls which he had cached a long time previously had been broached, Kanu was at once looked upon as the leader.

For a few seasons peace and plenty reigned. The locusts appeared year after year, on their way to devastate the cultivated portions of the Colony, and the Bushmen thanked their G.o.ds for the boon, with elaborate sacrifices in which Kanu officiated as high priest. Then came the drought, which was attributed to the fact of one of their number having allowed his shadow to fall upon a dying ostrich in the afternoon. Had this happened in the morning, it would not have mattered so much but, happening when the sun was going home to rest, and thus preventing the luminary from taking his lawful dues in the matter of supper, it was looked upon as likely to prove a deadly affront to all the spirits of the sky, who were the sun's subjects. These spirits, who sent or withheld run as pleased their capricious minds, the Bushmen feared and constantly endeavoured to propitiate. The man guilty of this heinous offence was looked at askance by all, but was forgiven after elaborate and painful rites had been solemnised over him. Nevertheless, when the drought increased in intensity, and the children began to sicken from drinking the salt-charged water from the failing spring, the offender found it judicious to disappear.

As soon as the women had returned from the spring, bearing their bark nets full of ostrich-eggsh.e.l.ls containing water,--the sh.e.l.ls being closed with a wooden peg at each end, a start was made. The skins were rolled up into bundles and upon these were bound the earthen pots and the bags containing the very scanty store of grain. This grain was the seed of the "twa" gra.s.s, plundered from the store-houses of ants. The women and children were loaded to their utmost capacity of draught, whilst the men carried nothing but their bows and arrows, and their digging sticks. These last were pointed pegs of very hard wood, about eighteen inches long, stuck through round stones four or five inches in diameter, which had been pierced for the purpose. The object of the stone was to give the sticks weight in the digging.

The oldest of the women was charged with the important duty of carrying fire. The Bushman knew no metal and, consequently, had no tinderbox, so his only way of kindling fire was by the long and laborious process of twirling a stick with the point inserted in a log, between the palms of the hands. Thus whenever a move was made from one place to another, one of the party was appointed fire-carrier. When the two sticks which invariably were carried had nearly burnt out, a halt was called and a fire lit from twigs; in this two fresh sticks were lighted; these would then be carried forward another stage. As a matter of fact Kanu had learnt the use of tinder from the Hottentots, and had, as a great miracle, kindled some dry and pulverised bark from a spark generated by striking a fragment of iron which he picked up at the spot where some European hunters had camped, upon a flake of quartz. But, after the principle enunciated by a modern philosopher, that it is a mistake to call down fire from Heaven whenever you cannot lay your hand upon the matchbox, Kanu rightly judged that his miracle would lose some of its most important advantages if repeated too often, so he reserved it for great emergencies, and allowed the time-honoured plan of fire-carrying from place to place to continue. In this Kanu showed a very sound political instinct, and his example might be profitably followed by many reformers whose impatience to put the whole world straight all at once, often defeats its own ends.

Consider, for a moment, what the result of a popularising of the tinderbox would have been:--In the first place what was looked upon as a miracle would have ceased to be regarded as such and, with the miraculous, a good deal of Kanu's influence would have gone. Then,--the old woman whose function it was to carry fire-sticks would not alone have lost her importance, but would have had to carry heavy loads like the other women.

Not only she, but her immediate relations, might have resented this, and, accordingly, Kanu would probably have weakened the allegiance of at least one-fourth of his subjects. There is nothing, in the humble opinion of the writer, which proves Kanu's natural fitness for leadership so much as his having decided against the popularising of the tinderbox.

Now that the lightning-sign, which had been so long and so anxiously waited for, had come, the black despair which Kanu and his companions had been the prey of during the last few months, gave way to sanguine hope. They knew that the ordeal which had to be endured,--the crossing of the black belt of scorched desert which lay between them and the track of the thunder shower, would strain their endurance to the utmost, but such experiences are but incidents in the life of the Bushman--and he takes them as they come, without repining at Fate. In their different hunting trips they had exhausted all the caches of water-filled eggsh.e.l.ls within a distance of two days' march, but there was one cache far away on the edge of the great dune-region to the north-eastward which, if they could manage to hold out for four days on the brackish liquid which they were carrying and,--if the treasure should prove not to have been broached, would relieve their necessities for the moment, and enable them to make a successful dash for the deep and precipitous gorge through which the great Gariep winds on its mysterious course to the ocean.

After descending the mountain the Bushmen struck across the plain in single file, heading due north-east. The men stalked ahead, trusting that their dread of prowling beasts of prey would keep the women and children, heavily laden as they were, close behind. Soon the liquid beams of the Morning Star warned them that the friendly night was nearly over, and they quickened their paces so as to reach a long, low ridge dotted with _karee_ bushes and large arboreal aloes, which lay some distance ahead, and on the side of which some protection might be afforded from the raging sun. When day broke this ridge loomed large before them in the midst of the oceanlike plain, but before they reached it the day was well on towards noon. Then water was dealt out in sparing quant.i.ties to human beings and dogs alike, and the weary wayfarers scattered about seeking shade under rock, tree and shrub.

In several directions could be seen clouds of dust arising,--indications of the migrating herds of game; far and near the silent sand-spouts glided about in stately rhythm, like spectres of the daytime threading some mysterious dance-measure. Early in the afternoon the clean-cut margin of a snow-white cloud projected slightly above the north-eastern horizon. This turned the expectation of rain falling upon the plains before them to a certainty, but the track of the storm-cloud was an appalling distance ahead.

When the sun had somewhat declined another start was made. The women now kept together, while the men scattered out on other side of the course with digging-picks in readiness to unearth roots and tubers should the drought have left any indication of their existence above ground. Each warrior wore a skin fillet around his head, into which his supply of poisoned arrows was stuck by the points, the shafts standing straight up in a circle reaching high above him. This served the double purpose of having the arrows where they could be easily got at when required, and making the braves look fierce and formidable in the event of an enemy being met with.

The unbroken plain now lay before them in all its solitary horror; their only hope of relief lay a three-days agony in front. The sand,--so hot in Summer on the plains of Bushmanland that one can cook an egg in it several inches below the surface,--scorched their feet; it even caused the dogs to roll over and lie on their backs, howling from the pain they suffered.

As night fell the men closed in, bringing the scanty supply of lizards, striped-faced desert mice with long, bushy tails, roots and other desert produce which they had succeeded in capturing or unearthing. The little band pressed on silently over the sand which had now begun somewhat to cool down, and beneath the stars which seemed so close above them in the purple vault. Some of the men now remained behind to a.s.sist the weaker of the women, who were lagging, by relieving them of portions of their heavy loads.

At each halt which was made for the purpose of rekindling the fire-sticks, all but the one charged with the duty of kindling the fire lay down and sank at once into deep sleep. When the sticks were once more properly alight the sleepers would be wakened by a touch and, once more, the party would steal, ghost-like, across the velvet-like sand.

Day broke, and when the party halted a little shade was obtained by stretching skins over sticks stuck into the ground. Then a fire was soon kindled and the food obtained on the previous day cooked and eaten.

Another sparing ration of water was issued and, in spite of its scarcity, and of the fact that every drop was as it were their life-blood, a small libation was poured out on the sand to propitiate the spirits of the sky who so greedily drank up moisture from the thirsty earth.

It was late in the afternoon of the third day when they reached the spot where the water-filled eggsh.e.l.ls lay buried. Some of the women and children had been left half a day's march behind, where they had dropped from thirst and exhaustion. Fortunately the cache was found to be intact. During the night a supply of water was sent back to those left behind, and early in the forenoon of next day the whole party was once more together. Their only loss was that of their best dog; the animal went mad while they were digging for the water, and rushed away to meet its death alone among the dunes.

They rested all that day as well as the next night, and it was on the following day that Kanu made the great discovery which more than ever convinced his followers of their leader's supernatural powers. Before dawn Kanu left the encampment on a solitary hunting expedition.

Skirting the edge of the dune-tract he went on and on, wondering sorely at the absence of game of every description. Then he noticed a number of tracks of jackals, all converging towards one point. Following one of these he was led to a narrow opening in a low, overhanging ledge of rock. Entering the opening and groping about, he found himself in a small, oblong cave. His heart beat fast, for he distinctly smelt water.

Feeling along the walls of the cavern he came to an inner opening, of size just sufficient to admit the body of a man. This proved to be the mouth of a pa.s.sage which dipped inward at a steep angle. Kanu held his bow by one end and tried to find the bottom of the shaft, but unsuccessfully. Then he carefully let himself down, feet first. Soon he found himself standing,--or rather half-reclining,--with his feet in icy cold water, but the pa.s.sage was so narrow that he could not stoop sufficiently to reach the water even with his hands.

With some difficulty he managed to extricate himself, and then he turned and let himself down head first, having previously placed his bow across the opening and fastened a thong to it, so as to enable him to work his way back again. He drank his fill of water more delicious than anything he had tasted for years past and then hastened back to where he had left his companions.

Great were the rejoicings over what to all appearances was a permanent spring, the water of which was absolutely perfect in quality. The little community at once decided to make the cave their head quarters.

Food was plentiful and easy to obtain. On account of the general drought no water was to be found anywhere else in the neighbourhood; consequently, numbers of jackals visited the spot every night. Of these, the flesh of which is looked upon by the Bushman as being a special delicacy, as many as were required for consumption were slain.

Later, when the rains came, the herds of game returned; moreover, the vicinity proved to be rich in "veldkost," which is the name by which the edible bulbs and tubers with which the desert sometimes abounds, are known by.

The years went by and these Bushmen, isolated as they were from the rest of mankind, led a life of absolutely ideal happiness from their own point of view. They had no want ungratified; to them the desert and what it contained were all-sufficing. There were no other human creatures anywhere near them, so they had nothing to fear.

It is a mistake to suppose that the life of the Bushmen was solely that of animals. Besides painting, they possessed the art of mimicry to a high degree and were, moreover, excellent actors. Their plays were hunting scenes, the characters being the different animals they were accustomed to hunt. The cries, movements and peculiarities of such were imitated as accurately as was possible by human beings, and a curious tincture of humour,--humour of a kind almost unintelligible to the civilised mind, was imported into the personifications. For instance: the shifts and stratagems by means of which a trio of ostriches will endeavour to lead an enemy away from their nest,--the simulated alarm of the birds when the enemy takes a wrong direction and the comparative absence of any sign of uneasiness if he takes the right one, were hit off to the life and accentuated with an amount of drollery one might think the subject incapable of sustaining.

The favourite episode for dramatic representation was the robbing of the lion of his prey. The lion's favourite time for killing is just before daybreak. After he has killed he loves to drain, at his ease, every drop of blood from the carcase of his quarry. The act of killing by the king-killer of the wilderness is a noisy affair and, if it happened within a radius of several miles, and the wind were not unfavourable, the sound was almost sure to reach the keen ears of the pygmies. Then all would turn out, each being armed with a firebrand and carrying a bundle of dry, inflammable gra.s.s and twigs.

Approaching the spot where the kill had taken place, from different directions, the Bushmen would begin to shout and jeer at the lion and call him by all sorts of ridiculous and insulting terms. If he attempted to attack, some of the inflammable stuff would at once be ignited, and the lion, no matter how enraged, would always turn tail and retreat from the blaze. All this time the circle would be gradually closing in, leaving a gap through which the baffled and furious animal could beat a retreat, snarling and showing his teeth.

In the Bushman's moonlit theatre this scene would be acted with astonishing skill and realism. In regions where the clans were thickly distributed, a good actor of the lion's part in this popular play would be as sure of a welcome as if he were a great painter, and thus could pick and choose his society among the different communities.

Kanu had much to tell his fellows about his varied experiences, and the relation of these was always more than half acted. The old, bald-headed man with the white beard who had sentenced him to be whipped, would have felt his dignity to be seriously compromised if he had seen his former victim perched on a rock mimicking him, and declaiming gibberish to a group of convulsed admirers; accentuating in a most preposterous manner every one of His Worshipful peculiarities.

It was in the hunting-field that the true potency of the Bushman was shown. Inside a wicker framework covered with the skin of an ostrich, the hunter would stalk in among an unsuspecting flock of feeding birds.

With slow, swaying stride,--the long neck bent down and the beak bobbing as though pecking at the green beetles on the bushes, the counterfeit presentment of a stately, full-plumaged male would edge its way in, making the characteristic by-play which the male adopts when he wants to attract the females by an affective display of his beauties. Then, one by one, the members of the doomed flock would bite the dust, and the slayer, doffing his disguise, would proceed to cut up the carcases into pieces convenient for roasting,--or else collect fuel pending the arrival of his friends with the fire-stick.

Thus pa.s.sed the halcyon days. Kanu and his men became muscular and wiry; the women and children fat and sleek. Kanu was venerated by his subjects as a powerful but beneficent magician, who had gone to some wonderful "other" world and returned laden with gifts of useful knowledge. Ksoa, Delilah-like, tried to get him to reveal to her the secret of his power, so he told her that he had been taken captive once by a monstrous being which was about to eat him,--when a blind lioness of wonderful size, strength and beauty had set him free and destroyed his enemy. This lioness had given him as a charm a hair out of her own splendid mane. So long, he said, as this hair were not stolen from him, or lost, all would go well with him and his. If, however, the hair were to be stolen,--not alone would good fortune depart from Kanu and his clan, but dire disaster would fall upon the stealer.

One day, after much persuasion, Kanu consented to show his wife the talisman. It had been carefully rolled around a dry leaf; Ksoa marvelled greatly as she saw its length uncoiled and saw how it glinted in the sun. She did not dare to touch it, but begged of her lord to put the precious thing safely away at once, lest anything should happen to it.

"What a great and wonderful lioness that must have been.--And a lioness with a mane," she commented, in an awed whisper.

"Yes," answered Kanu, with a sigh.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

HOW STEPHa.n.u.s PURSUED GIDEON.

Early in the morning after the arrival of Stepha.n.u.s, the mob of cattle was driven in and with the a.s.sistance of some of the Hottentots a fairly good span of oxen was sorted out. Then the wagon was loaded with provisions and water, and Stepha.n.u.s started in pursuit of the brother who had fled before his accusing face. Elsie insisted on accompanying her father; Stepha.n.u.s, full of the trust in Providence which he had attained to through suffering,--imbued with that sublime confidence which had come to him in his nine years of repentance, prayer and watching,--made no objection.

A great happiness welled up in Aletta's heart and seemed to transfigure her, body and soul. She felt that her dark hour had indeed been the prelude to a day brighter than her starved soul had known for many years. With feverish haste she completed the preparations for departure, and when the wagon rolled away up the steep kloof-track, its fresh team of sixteen drawing it with hardly an effort, she watched it until her sight grew dim with happy tears. Then she and Stepha.n.u.s knelt down and he breathed forth a prayer as humbly exultant as ever the rapt singer of Israel uttered like trumpet blast whose sound still fills the centuries.

Afterwards, Stepha.n.u.s followed the wagon on horseback, and Aletta turned to the joyful task of garnishing the dismal, unkempt house in preparation for her husband's return.