Lodges in the Wilderness Part 10

We descended the flank of the last really high mountain, intending to rest just below the lordly gate of the immense labyrinth from which we had emerged,--from the threshold of which the mist-shrouded plains extend to the Atlantic. For when the hot winds of the desert stream over the cold antarctic current that washes this coast, they draw up moisture which is blown back landward in the form of vapour. Herein lies the explanation of the circ.u.mstance that the coast desert is occasionally, for months at a time, densely shrouded in mist.

There--before the mountain gate--where the wearied water glided away in thankful silence from the last of the thunderous rapids that vexed its course,--was one of the favourite resorts of the only remaining school of sea-cows on that side of Africa, south of the tropical line. Of all the myriad hosts of wonderful wild creatures that until lately populated these desert plains and mountains, only this one school of hippopotami and a few hundred springbuck survive. I could hardly hope to find the sea-cows--at all events while daylight lasted; it would suffice if at night I might listen to their snorting and blowing--to the rustling in the reed-brakes as the huge creatures emerged from the water in search of food. These sounds would bring back memories of days long past--of adventures in other pastures of South Africa's rich and varied wonderland.

Before the sun had set we camped in a sandy hollow, a few hundred yards from the river's bank. There were no rocks in the immediate vicinity so we hoped to escape the usual plague of tarantulas. After a long, luxurious swim in the placid river, I returned to examine the collections of Flora and Fauna. The latter had been permitted to wander afield that day. The number of centipedes, scorpions and miscellaneous reptiles which had been soused in the poisoned spirit was so great that I no longer feared her attempting to sample it as a beverage. The harvest was more rich and interesting than usual. Flora had found a gorgeous stapelia with a more than ordinarily atrocious smell, and Fauna had captured a beetle infested with a most extraordinary parasite; also a small, speckled toad--a novelty, I thought--and a scorpion which, when stretched out, measured eight and a half inches. Well done, Fauna!

Hendrick had roasted a pheasant to a turn. I was savagely hungry; just as I was about to begin eating I noticed some people approaching along our trail. These comprised a man, two women and several children. I was filled with foreboding. The strangers approached, each carrying something with carefulness. They set offerings before me. These consisted of ghoonyas, and nothing else.

What did these people take me for; did they suppose I lived on a ghoonya diet--that I fed my caravan on ghoonya soup? Was I to have the extinction of an innocent species of orthoptera on my already burthened conscience; or would the result of all this be the adoption of the ghoonya as the totem of the Richtersveld Tribe? Those unlucky threepenny pieces,--my unfortunate enthusiasm over the first specimens-- these seemed to have set the whole of the local population on the hunting trail for ghoonyas. Anger gave way to despair. I spoke a few words of appeal to Hendrick, seized my fragrant pheasant and hurriedly made for the open veld. When I returned, half an hour later, the ghoonyas and the strangers had disappeared. I never enquired as to how Hendrick had disposed of them.

After darkness had fallen I took my kaross and strolled down to the water's edge. There I spent some peaceful, contemplative hours waiting for the sea-cows which, however, did not come. Then, with a contented heart I welcomed the touch of the wing of sleep upon my eyelids, and turned over to compose my tired thews for recuperative repose against the fatigues of the morrow.

Just before dawn I woke up cold and very damp. A thick fog had rolled in with the westerly breeze. My kaross was soaked through. So dense was the vapour that I had to wait, shivering, until it was broad daylight before attempting to find my way back to the camp. Even then I had to bend down and trace, step by step, my spoor of the previous night.

Hendrick, who brought no blanket, cowered miserably over a few inadequate embers. He was wet through. The fuel collected when we camped had been all consumed. The candle-bush--that boon to travellers in Bushmanland--does not grow in the coast desert. I roused up the guides and ordered them out for fatigue duty in the form of collecting firewood. They attempted to shift the responsibility to Flora and Fauna, but I sternly repudiated this. The men, one and all, had to turn out. Flora was young; she could accompany them, but the venerable Fauna might, if she so desired, stay behind and keep the fading embers alive.

I a.s.signed to her a duty--she had to become a fog-horn for the occasion.

She was ordered to shout at intervals and continuously bang one of our two tin pannikins on our only tin plate. This would prevent any members of the scattered contingent getting lost. So dense was the fog that objects were invisible at the distance of a yard.

Soon we had a roaring fire. As we would reach Arris that afternoon, I used up all the remaining coffee in a general treat. Hendrick's pannikin was the only one available for use in the distribution of the precious fluid, so after regaling Fauna first and then Flora, the four men drew lots to determine who was to drink next. The last man claimed the grounds as his perquisite. His claim was disputed, but after carefully weighing the circ.u.mstances, I decided in his favour.

Soon the wind dropped and the mist thinned out. We made a start and, after walking for about an hour, reached a camp. It comprised an ancient wagon of the wooden-axle type, a mat-house and a small goat-kraal full of stock. The establishment belonged to the most well-to-do man in the Richtersveld. He was pointed out to me as such sitting among the members of the Raad. I then noticed that he wore a good pair of breeches and an air of prosperity. This man was the local representative of Capital. He was the possessor of a pony--a creature hardly as big as a middling-sized donkey.

I enquired about game. Yes, there were springbuck in the vicinity--not more than two or three miles from the camp, and not far from out of our course to Arris. They were said to be comparatively tame. Probably they had acquired a contempt for the Richtersveld guns, which, I fancied, were of an antiquated type.

I hired the pony for the day. My princ.i.p.al reason for doing this was to save my boots, which were rapidly wearing out. Flora, Fauna and Flora's husband were loaded up with the baggage and sent on to Arris. Hendrick, the three remaining guides, the Capitalist owner of the pony and I went to look for the springbuck.

Our course lay south-west. The fog had receded but not disappeared; it hung more or less thickly over the plains before us. But it lifted and fell in a most peculiar way; slow undulations, and graceful, deliberate eddies played along its indefinite fringe. Soon we noticed game spoor.

Yes,--the Capitalist was right. But how large the spoor was; it suggested blesbuck rather than springbuck.

What was that looming through the fog-fringe? It looked almost as large as a cow. But the brown stripe and the lyre-formed horns shewed up clearly every now and then; the creature was indubitably a springbuck.

It was not more than two hundred yards away. I supposed it was the changing drift of vapour that distorted and magnified the animal.

However, I fired and it fell.

When we approached the struggling creature I gazed upon it with astonishment; it was so immense. Why, it must have been nearly twice as large as the springbuck of the desert. I asked the Capitalist if this were not an extraordinary specimen. No, he said, all the bucks in the vicinity were about as large. Then I recalled having read in Francis Galton's book that he shot a springbuck weighing a hundred and sixty pounds near Walfish Bay. These Richtersveld bucks,--so the Capitalist informed me, do not trek. They must belong to a distinct sub-species,-- the range of which is restricted to the Coast Desert.

As we wandered on towards Arris, the fog-curtain kept ascending and again settling down. But it did not lift to any great extent; one could never see farther than from three to four hundred yards ahead. I shot three more bucks; all were of the same type. One young animal, with horns not more than a hands-breadth long, which I shot by mistake when the fog was more than usually thick, was larger than the ordinary buck of the inland desert. I presented one of the four bucks to the Capitalist; he hid it among some bushes, intending to pick it up as he returned from Arris with the pony. The other three carcases we took on with us. I meant to cut one up and divide it among the guides. It would not have done to have left the carcase to be dismembered on the return journey; these people were so jealous of each other that a fight would surely have resulted.

We reached Arris late in the afternoon. I learnt that some people had been there with ghoonyas, but Fauna so terrified them with a description of my wrath on the occasion of the last gatherers turning up, that they fled. To prevent misunderstanding it had better be explained that Arris is not a city--not even a hamlet. It is merely a place where, in specially favourable seasons, a few of the Richtersvelders sojourn with their goats. The locality is usually known by another name; one that is more realistic than refined.

Andries had rather chafed under the delay. Not knowing that springbuck were to be found in the vicinity he undertook the suggested expedition to the mouth of the Orange River, but turned back on account of the dense fog. However, he saw what I should dearly love to have seen: a troop of those wild horses which roam over that section of the desert.

He had been walking along the river sh.o.r.e about ten miles from here when the fog partially lifted. Within about two hundred yards of him he saw eight s.h.a.ggy horses with long, flowing manes and tails. They at once plunged into the water and swam out to the celebrated islands--that forest-covered archipelago which there enriches the river's widened course. I much regretted having missed that sight. Descended as they are from tame animals which escaped from man's control, these horses are as wild as the oryx. They have so far evaded capture by invariably taking to the water when pursued, and seeking refuge in the extensive island labyrinth. Long may they continue to do so.

The hour had now arrived for disbanding my corps of guides. I think I may truthfully say that we parted with genuine mutual esteem. The carcase of one of the springbuck had been dismembered and divided by lot among the faithful six. Pay had been distributed; likewise tobacco. I delivered a valedictory address.

With evident reluctance these people picked up their portions of meat and prepared to depart. Fauna apparently desired to communicate with me privately; she stood apart and gazed with appeal in her eyes. I went to her; she asked in a low, nervous voice--speaking in much-broken Dutch-- if I would not send her some of the medicine made from the reptiles and insects which had been collected.

At length I caught the drift of her meaning: she thought I was about to prepare from these ingredients some philtre that would bring back vanished youth. Truly, the mind of man is one when the crust of convention is pierced. This poor old creature, like Ponce de Leon, dreamt of Bimini and longed for a return of the thrilling ecstasies of life's morning. It cut me to the heart to have to shatter the fabric of her dream.

We decided to start for home on the following morning. I was sorry not to be able to visit the Orange River mouth and its flamingo-haunted dunes--the Vigita Magna of the old geographers. Strange, that I should again have had to miss it when only a few miles away. But I was really pressed for time; other duties insistently called me hundreds of miles thence. Nevertheless, had it not been for the fog, I would have expended another day. But the fog towards the coast was denser than ever, and there did not appear to be any reasonable likelihood of its clearing. So I would forego the barren privilege of being able to say that I had actually visited Vigita Magna.

Our homeward course lay more to the westward, for we travelled along the coast until close to Port Nolloth. We found fresh water at various spots, trickling out of sand hummocks in the immediate vicinity of the sea. We had a comparatively easy journey, for there were no steep, rocky ridges to cross.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

KAMIEBIES--THE BLOSSOMING WILDERNESS--THE OSTRICH POACHERS--HAIL STORMS--THE SPRINGBUCK BEHIND THE DUNE--HOW ANDRIES FOUND ME.

Reliable information reached me to the effect that the Half-Breed ostrich poachers had again been at their nefarious work. So we decided, Andries and I, to make a swoop upon the camp which these people had established in southern Bushmanland. This camp was in the vicinity of some wells, the water of which was brackish to such an extent that only men or animals who had gradually accustomed themselves to its flavour and properties, could consume it. Thus the gang of poachers had for a long time been able to defy us. After rain, however, the water grew somewhat less brackish. On the rare occasions when rain fell heavily, the proportion of brack decreased so much that the water became, for a few weeks, more or less fit for ordinary consumption.

The reason was a phenomenal one; the rains had set in a month before their usual time throughout the western desert and the mountain tract.

It was then the end of March, and rain had been falling, off and on, for the previous fortnight. Rarely, indeed, did the drought break before the middle of April.

There was also news of the springbucks. The great migration was not due to take place for months, but word had reached Andries to the effect that in the desert somewhere to the east of Kamiebies a moderately large herd had been seen. If the news were true, that herd must have been the first wave of an early-coming tide. Thus we might be able to settle accounts with the poachers and provide our year's supply of "bultong" in the course of one expedition.

The annual migration of springbucks across the desert is, I am positive, an inst.i.tution of immemorial antiquity. The reason for it is obvious.

The fawns are born in winter, and it is necessary that at the time the does should have green food to eat. But Bushmanland, excepting its extreme western fringe, is far drier in winter than in summer. In winter the feathery plumes of the "toa" crumble away to dust and the stumps of the tussocks turn jet-black. Then the plains become unmitigated desert.

Winter is the season during which rain falls among the mountains lying between Bushmanland and the coast desert. Then for a few short weeks the mountain range covers itself with verdure and flowers. Therefore the trek. However, of late years the mountain tract has been largely taken up by farmers, so the springbuck, as a rule, invade only its eastern margin. The western fringe of the plains usually get a slight sprinkling from the mountain rains. The exception happens when the trek, instead of being distributed over a wide extent, concentrates.

Then the springbuck, in their myriads, over-run hundreds of square miles of the mountain tract, and clear the face of the country of vegetation as completely as would a swarm of locusts.

The term "springbuck" is not a satisfying one for this ethereal creature--this most lovely and graceful of the animals whose home is in the desert. The name is too obvious; why not call it what it really is, a "gazelle?" But the early Dutch inhabitants of South Africa not alone lacked imagination, but shewed positive inept.i.tude in the names they bestowed on the various wild animals. Take for instance the term "gemsbok," as applied to the oryx; what could be more inappropriate?

"Gemsbok" means "Chamois"--and we have in South Africa an antelope which is a chamois to all intents and purposes, but which is called a "klipspringer." Again,--the tall, heavy, sober-tinted desert bustard is called the "paauw," a word which means "peac.o.c.k." However, these names are so firmly fixed in the South African vocabulary that any endeavour to change them would be a hopeless task.

We trekked south-east from Silverfontein in the spring-wagon, behind a team of eight spanking horses. We slept at Kamiebies, which is an uncertain water-place a few miles over the edge of the desert and a short day's journey south of Gamoep. During the day we rested; in the night we had to make a dash of some forty miles for our objective. We meant to take the poachers by surprise,--to drop on them just at daybreak, as though from the clouds. So in the mean time I lazed through the long, delicious day.

The rains had not alone been earlier and heavier than usual, but they had fallen throughout an unusually extensive area. The mountain tract was ablaze with flowers; even Bushmanland stirred in its aeon-old sleep, for the skirts of the last rain-cloud had trailed well over its borders, and the latent life of the waste had leaped, responsive, to the surface.

Now a whole flora that had slept for years in tubers and dry stalks sent forth blossoms in million-fold rivalry to attract the replete, drowsy insects.

Here, from a dense, th.o.r.n.y, involuted ma.s.s of gnarled, shapeless stems that must have been many centuries old, arose the delicate, fairy-like petals of a scented pelargonium. The corolla was snow-white, except for a minute, sagittate marking of bright cerise on the lower lip. If you had examined ten thousand of these flowers you would not have found one in which that little mark varied to the extent of the ten-thousandth part of an inch. The thought of which that blossom was the manifestation--the afterthought of which the tiny cerise arrowhead was the expression--dwelt down in the unlovely labyrinth of the monstrous stems, and had been adhered to with steady persistence through successions of long arid-year periods. It was whispered to the silk-winged seed from which that h.o.a.ry patriarch had birth,--perhaps when Alaric was thundering at the gates of Rome. And it would be as unerringly transmitted to blossoms making sweet the breeze in days when men will hold this generation to be as remote as we hold the dwellers of the Solutre Cavern.

There swayed a slender heliophila--the modest sunlover who, in the course of age-long, patient vigils, had drawn down and ensnared the hue of the desert sky in her petals. Far and near the plain was starred with beauty. The small, inornate, thirst-land b.u.t.terflies had ventured out from the hills; they flitted to and fro, lazy and listless. They sported with Amaryllis in the sunshine and then tried to flirt shamelessly with Iris, the shy maiden on the nodding, hair-like stem-- who veiled her visage in sober brown by day, but revealed it, white and eager to the stars whilst she made the wings of the night-wind faint with perfume.

An oval shrub attracted one's attention--not through its beauty, but because it was an object startling and bizarre. It looked as though covered with rags of various tints. This was that criminal among vegetables--the Roridula. A close inspection almost filled one with horror; the plant was like a shambles. The leaves resembled toothed traps; in most of them insects were tightly gripped. After these had been sucked dry,--drained of blood and of every vestige of bodily juices, the leaves opened, dropped the mangled and dessicated frames to the ground and cynically opened their fell jaws for more victims.

Undeterred by the litter of corpses that c.u.mbered the surrounding ground, other insects crowded in to taste of the viscid juice which the leaves exuded. This was the bait tempting to their doom moths, b.u.t.terflies, beetles and other minor fauna. Here was Capitalism playing on the greed and credulity of the crowd,--gorging on the life-blood of its hapless dupes,--flourishing and waxing strong amid the ruin of its countless victims.

My eye was caught by a quivering twig; on it was a chameleon. The reptile was nearly nine inches long. His colour was brown, of a shade exactly the same as that of the twig. He moved forward with slow, hesitating steps; he paced like an amateur on the tight-rope, as though afraid of falling. His swivel eye-cases, each with a tiny, diamond-bright speck in the centre, moved about independently of each other. One was focussed on a little green insect waving its antennae on a leaf six inches in front of him; the other was carefully trained backwards over his left shoulder at me. Flick--and his tongue shot out and in so rapidly that the eye could hardly follow its motion. But the insect was no longer on the leaf, and the chameleon was munching something with solemn enjoyment. When night fell he would climb to the top of a strong, dry twig, roll and tuck himself into the shape of a pear, with his head in the centre of the bulge. Then he would change his hue to white and open his mouth, which was bright orange internally.

The night-flying lepidoptera would take him for a white, yellow-centred flower, and pop in, seeking nectar. But they would not pop out again.

And the greatest wonder of all,--I bent down to examine a gazania; its inch-long golden rays expanded like a wheel of perfect symmetry. Just where the ray bent over the edge of the green, fleshy cup in which the myriad florets were nested, was a small, dark spot. I brought a simple magnifying gla.s.s to bear on this,--and what did I see? A labyrinthine crater of many-coloured fire opened. Curve melted and mingled into reluctant curve, zone into rainbow zone, until the plummet of vision was lost in the radiant abyss. I lifted the flower gently; its texture was thinner than the thinnest paper; beneath it was the desert sand. It had hardly any material thickness, yet infinity lay in its depths. I sought for a gazania of another species and found its petals eyed like the peac.o.c.k's tail. Yet another,--it shewed the rose-ardours of dawn contending with the purple of a sea on whose surface night still brooded. Every species had its own colour-scheme--its maze of splendour more intricate than the labyrinth of King Minos.

Old Mr Von Schlicht of Klipfontein--who had spent most of his life in Namaqualand, had recently been endeavouring to recall for me details of the desert journeys of Ecklon and Drege, who did so much for South African botany. I ascertained that Ecklon visited Kamiebies. How his heart must have leaped when his eyes first gathered in the winter glory of those mountains. When he afterwards stood, begging his bread at the corner of the Heerengracht, Cape Town,--did he ever recall that scene?

Strange world of men that so often lets its n.o.blest, after lives of heroic toil for the highest and most unselfish ends, die in the gutter-- if it does not more mercifully slay them--and pays tribute of corn, wine and oil, of jewels and fine raiment, to the company-monger or other chartered robber adroit enough to squeeze through the meshes of the law.

We inspanned at sunset, and plunged straight into the desert, travelling slightly to the south of east. Our objective was lower Pof Adder--which must not be confounded with the northern Pof Adder beyond Namies. We were out of the region of "toa"; the plain was covered with small shrub,--half of which were soft and succulent and the others hard and th.o.r.n.y. There were no intermediate kinds; the desert is a region of extremes.

In spite of the jolting I managed to get a few hours' sleep. We outspanned for an hour at midnight and made coffee. Now we had some heavy sand-tracts to cross,--with jolty stretches lying between them.

But we reached the camp of the half-breeds just at dawn, as had been intended.