Lodges in the Wilderness Part 8

There were several features of interest connected with the vley. The water had shrunk to a series of small puddles. Swimming about in every one of these were large numbers of tiny organisms, each with a single, immense eye. These creatures belonged to a species of "Apus,"--a genus of one of the crustacean sub-families. On a trip undertaken during the previous year I had found an Apus of another species in a vley less than thirty miles from Brabies,--a vley which probably does not contain water more than once in five years. This development of separate species in localities so close to each other, suggested that local conditions had not materially changed for a very long period. No vley was found to contain more than a single variety. These quaint creatures swim through their little hour of fully developed life and, when the drying up of the water kills them, the eggs they contain are freed. Then these are blown hither and thither among the dust of the desert until another advent.i.tious shower fills the vley in which they were generated, and some chance wind-gust carries a few of them into the water. The indefinite preservation of the life-germ on the occasionally almost red-hot surface of the desert is little short of miraculous.

Yes,--the Brabies vley must have existed under approximately similar conditions from an immensely remote antiquity. It is probable that in comparatively recent times rain was more plentiful in Bushmanland (as there is reason to believe it was generally throughout South Africa), than it now is. For there were evidences that Brabies was once a centre of population. Pottery, obviously of Bushman manufacture, abounded. If one broke a fragment, the charred fibres of the woven gra.s.s-blades on which the clay design had been formed, could be clearly seen. In the low, stone ledges surrounding the vley were to be seen grooves evidently caused by the sharpening of weapons. Some of these grooves were very deep, and as the Bushmen's arrow-heads were made of bone, the scores must have been the result of sharpening by many generations. A few of them looked as fresh as if they had been used the previous day.

A careful search discovered stone implements of various types,-- palaeolithic as well as neolithic. These suggested a receding succession of prehistoric peoples to days unthinkably remote. Some of the weapons were very peculiar,--they were either spear-heads or arrow-heads. But they seemed too small for the former and too large for the latter. If they were spear-heads they must have been used by pygmies; if arrow-heads by giants.

As there were apparently no springbucks worth the hunting on that side of the desert, we decided to return home at once. We thus had no opportunity of testing the qualities of the fearsome hunting-chariot-contraption constructed by Andries. I was not altogether sorry; my bones ached in antic.i.p.ation of our probable experiences in it,--behind the half-broken team.

Each morning when the sun first grew hot, the vley was invaded by countless myriads of desert grouse. Of these we shot some hundreds, which we salted down for home consumption.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

THE RICHTERSVELD--KUBOOS--THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD REDIVIVUS-- GOLD-SEEKING--THE RAAD--MORBID SENSIBILITY--START FOR EL DORADO.

Just before the Orange River, wearied from its long travail, slides into the Atlantic, it bends in a sickle-shaped curve. Its course for the previous three hundred miles has been through the tremendous and almost inaccessible gorge into whose depths it hurled itself at the Augrabies Falls.

The incidence of those aggregates of men which pa.s.s, like the individual, through the successive stages of youth, maturity and decay, and which we are accustomed to term civilisations, is as much a question of geology as of geography. Accadia and Egypt grew great and stained many pages of the record we term history by virtue of the circ.u.mstance that the Euphrates and the Nile, after leaving the mountains that gave them birth, flowed respectively through low, level countries which they enriched with precious alluvium. The Orange River was, however, sped oceanwards over a vast plateau of hard-grained rock, several thousand feet above sea-level. Into this the stream has been slowly biting, and the alluvium--that meat upon which material civilisation is nourished, was hurled through the channel and flung wastefully into the maw of the all-consuming waves. Under different physiographical circ.u.mstances another Alexandria might have arisen where to-day the flamingo nests among the misty dunes at the Orange River's mouth, "and another Sphinx, of Hottentot or Bantu physiognomy, might have stood, gazing through forgotten centuries, across the waste of Bushmanland." [_Between Sun and Sand_.]

The tract lying within the sickle-bend is called the Richtersveld.

Little is known of this tract or of its inhabitants. Half a century ago prospecting for copper ore was carried on in the vicinity. Indications of the metal abounded, but no payable deposit was discovered.

I decided to organise an expedition to the Richtersveld. There were several reasons for doing this. One was a complaint which had been made to the Attorney General of the Cape Colony respecting the alleged flogging of a man under orders of the missionary at Kuboos, which is still haunted by the ghost of an inst.i.tution established by the London Missionary Society in years long gone by. Another was a reported discovery of gold. This, as a matter of fact was my ostensible excuse for starting at the time I did. Third and last was my own keen desire to explore a little-known tract and make the acquaintance of its human and other inhabitants.

The Richtersveld, according to report, was extremely mountainous and was said to contain only some two hundred people of Koranna-Bushman and Hottentot descent. So remote and isolated was this region that its dwellers were tacitly permitted to govern themselves. They had a "raad"

or council of elders which, under presidency of the missionary, settled all disputes and generally administered justice,--informal, but none the less just on that account. The language spoken by the Richtersvelders is an almost extinct Hottentot dialect, full of clicks, gutterals and phonetic excursions impossible to the average European tongue. Only a few of the people had even the merest smattering of Dutch.

That excursion involved more difficulties than any other I had undertaken. There was, it is true, not more than a bare hundred miles of desert to cross, but the only definite information we had been able to gain as to the route was to the effect that it led through a tract practically waterless and extremely difficult to traverse. Moreover, it was reported to be absolutely uninhabited. One thing was quite clear,-- we should have to travel with oxen; horses would have been useless under the conditions as described.

Andries arrived bringing--not the comfortable, tilted, spring-wagon,-- but the strong, heavy, tentless "buck" wagon, with a team of sixteen picked oxen. He seemed uneasy as to our prospects, for the coast desert had a bad reputation and we were about to plunge into a wilderness with the conditions of which he was unfamiliar. The map was produced, but Andries rather despises maps. This one shewed little beyond "gaps" and "unhabitable downs." But it indicated, roughly, our obvious route. We would travel alongside the copper-trolley-line as far as Anenous, which lay at the foot of the mountain range and thus on the inner margin of the coast desert,--which is little, if at all, above the level of the sea. From Anenous we had to trend to the north-west, past Tarabies, Lekkersing and the northern trigonometrical beacon. Thence via h.e.l.l Gate to Kuboos, where the wagon would have to remain. Any further journeyings would apparently have to be undertaken on foot. Possibly, however, we might be able to obtain pack-oxen.

Judging by the map, the course looked obvious and easy, but we knew that the surface of the coast desert was composed of deep, soft sand, into which the wheels of the heavy wagon would sink deeply, and that through the sandy tract the northern range of mountains sent out spines or d.y.k.es of rock, many miles in length. These, we were told, often took the form of abrupt ridges extremely difficult to negotiate with any vehicle, no matter how strongly built.

The officials of the Cape Copper Company at Anenous (which was the jumping-off place for our hundred-mile sand-swim) knew nothing of the country two miles on either side of the trolley-line. All they were definite about was that no one had ever been known to arrive at Anenous from the northward or north-westward.

Such Hottentots as we were able to consult all declared that it was only under very exceptional circ.u.mstances that water was to be found between the trolley-line and the Orange River.

Andries' feelings must have resembled those of a seaman ordered to navigate his ship through an uncharted archipelago. Owing to our absolute lack of local knowledge we should be constrained to do all our travelling by day, and this meant severe suffering for the cattle. In the old days of prospecting for copper ore, all communication with the Richtersveld was effected by a route along the actual sea-sh.o.r.e from Port Nolloth to the Orange River's mouth and thence inland along the river bank to the sickle-bend.

We started from Anenous very early in the morning. On the previous day we had kept the oxen without water, so that almost to the moment of commencing the journey they might be very thirsty, and accordingly drink their fill. We at once plunged into the waste of sand; this proved to be so heavy that we were unable to travel at a higher rate than two miles an hour. The country was quite different from the Bushmanland plains; there was no "toa," but succulent plants of great variety were plentiful. One Mesembryanthemum had the dimensions of a large cabbage.

In spite of its succulence the oxen would not eat of this vegetation.

The climate, also, was different from that of the Bushmanland plains; the heat was not so great, but what there was of it proved exhausting.

A haze brooded over the earth; through it the north-western mountain range loomed gigantic and mysterious. There were no roads,--unless a wide-meshed network of half-obliterated tracks--probably old game-paths--could be described as such. One strange peculiarity of the coastal desert is the extraordinary persistence of spoor and other markings on the surface of the ground. Near Walfish Bay the clear tracks of elephants may still be seen,--and there has not been an elephant in the vicinity for upwards of half a century.

After desperate efforts we reached Kuboos on the afternoon of the fourth day. I never thought it possible that a wagon could travel where ours did. We ploughed through calamitous expanses of sand, we floundered through dusty dongas. We b.u.mped and clattered over high, steep-sided ramparts of rock. But the skill of Andries as a driver, the endurance of the oxen and the strength of the wagon brought us safely through.

The quaint little collection of ramshackle buildings forming the missing station, was perched on a ledge just below where the more or less gradual descent of the T'Oums Mountain falls steeply into the gorge, at the bottom of which the dry bed of the Anys River lies. In the centre stood, skeleton-like, the inevitable unfinished church, its narrow gables uplifted like clamorous hands to heaven in an apparently vain appeal for funds.

The groaning, b.u.mping wagon came to a halt before a low cottage built of sun-dried bricks and thatched with reeds. From it emerged a figure startling in its incongruity. This was a tall, elderly, erect man dressed in black broad-cloth, with a bell-topper and a very voluminous white choker. He was coloured; that was quite evident, but the stately dignity of his stride as he advanced, and the courtly grace of his demeanour when he greeted us, could not have been improved upon by a Chesterfield. Self-confidence and a complete ease of manner were apparent in every word, in every graceful gesture. He spoke in High Dutch, before which my homely "taal" faltered, abashed. I should say his age was nearer seventy than sixty. This was the Reverend Mr Hein, Resident Missionary of Kuboos and Dictator of the Richtersveld.

Feeling somewhat subdued, we followed Mr Hein to his dwelling, where he ushered us through the lowly portal. The room we entered was small and poorly furnished, but scrupulously clean. The thong-bottomed sofa and chairs were evidently home-made; although rough in point of workmanship they were strong and comfortable. The walls were garnished with illuminated Bible texts and portraits of the Royal Family. The floor was of clay; the thatch of the roof could be seen through a gridiron of rafters.

Mr Hein took the head of the table and played the host to perfection.

We had evidently been expected,--but how information as to our projected visit could have reached Kuboos, was more than I could fathom. However, we sat at the hospitable board and regaled ourselves with excellent coffee, rye bread and honey. The members of the family,--two fairly young men and two middle-aged damsels,--joined us. Mrs Hein was, alas, no more. She had died under a weight of years, so we were informed, a few months previously. The sons and daughters were darker in hue than their father. They were obviously ill at ease before us, strangers.

The host kept the conversational ball rolling without an effort.

Andries was pathetically puzzled; the situation had got beyond him. He was as prejudiced on the Colour Question as are most colonists; in the abstract he hated the idea of sitting at table with coloured people.

But on this occasion he felt himself to be completely outcla.s.sed in the items of manners and culture; consequently he became acutely embarra.s.sed. However, he appreciated the coffee (he told me afterwards that his own wife, who had a wide reputation as a coffee-maker, could not have made it better) and the bread and honey were delicious.

Of whom was it that Mr Hein reminded me? His personality set some familiar chord vibrating. Was it--yes, it was--Parson Primrose; it was he and none other. I tried to extend the parallel. Either of the sons might, at a pitch, have pa.s.sed for Moses. George? Well,--hardly.

Olivia and Sophia?--Oh, well--hm--that was another matter. But at all events there was the dear old Vicar, reincarnated under a yellow skin, in that citadel of loneliness that had a hundred-mile fosse of desert sand and a rampart of all-but-impa.s.sible mountains,--that most remote corner of the habitable world. Chamisso was right:--

"Alle menschen sind einander gleich."

Next morning I met the "Raad," and we discussed the matter of the flogging. That Raad was a quaint a.s.semblage; surely the most peculiar parliament on earth. It was composed of elderly men, all of a more or less monkeylike physiognomy. Mr Hein took the chair and filled it with the utmost dignity. The members were restrained in manner, temperate in discussion and logical in all they said. Their delivery was pleasing, the rules of debate were strictly observed. Several of the speeches were made in Dutch; those given in the Hottentot tongue were interpreted into Dutch for my benefit.

The individual who had received the flogging was present. He was a young married man with a weak chin, a shifty eye and a voluble tongue.

His face possessed a certain measure of meretricious good-looks, evidently he was a lady-killer; one of the cheaper varieties of that species. He, an officer of the church, had committed an offence against the moral law. The partner in his guilt was present, looking sufficiently woe-begone. She did not possess the fatal gift of beauty,--at all events according to Caucasian standards. The injured spouse, attired in a goatskin robe, was present and wept softly at intervals throughout the proceedings. She was distinctly less uncomely than the erring sister.

The Raad had dealt with the case and sentenced the culprit, who had admitted his guilt, to receive three dozen with a "strop," which were immediately and energetically inflicted. The punishment, although illegal, had been richly deserved. I considered that the Raad had acted with propriety,--but it was necessary to be guarded in what I said. If the principle involved had been given formal official sanction, it might have been logically applied to more serious cases,--those, for instance, in which capital punishment would have been due. If, at some future time, the Vicar under my implied authority had erected a gallows and engaged the services of a Lord High Executioner, it would have been awkward, to say the least of it.

Accordingly I temporised. Lothario of the shifty eye was informed that his case would be duly considered at head-quarters. So it would,--by the moths inhabiting the pigeonholes of the Record Office in Cape Town.

Nevertheless I should have to deal cunningly with this episode so as to avoid raising a humanitarian howl. However, I meant, so far as I could to support the authority of the Raad. The result of discrediting that would have been to loosen the bonds of the moral law,--to hand the Richtersveld over to be exploited by the violent and lawless. This Raad interested me extremely; it was so wise and so conscientious. The Colonial Parliament might really have learnt quite a lot of useful things from it.

We are a curious people. The solicitude we are apt to evince for the posterior of a blackguard is really marvellous--considering how little we have for the victims of an industrial system under which hundreds of thousands of men, women and children are leading lives of the most degrading slavery. We see, with complacency, whole generations growing stunted and vacant-eyed under stress of their bitter lot; we know--or should know, for we have been told it often enough--that one of the pillars in the edifice of our commercial prosperity is the sweated woman in the garret,--old, haggard and hopeless at thirty. She st.i.tches or pastes for fourteen hours a day in the blind, numbing effort to keep her blighted soul in her stunted body, and we complacently draw the dividends her long-drawn torture helps to swell. But we forget it is that woman's grandchildren who may have to defend ours from the Huns.

Yes,--a fatal habit of acquiescing in demoralising conditions permits us to look on at, without attempting to prevent, the slow, relentless murder of a race. But the blackguard's back--that is something sacred; the mere idea of its being defiled by the richly deserved lash fills us with horror. The divine force of indignation which is in the heart of every man,--a holy thing when used for the right purpose--is thus wasted, dissipated--fired off at a straw dummy held aloft, as it were, by Commercialism for the purpose of drawing our attention from its own foul works.

And if we came to honestly examine our own feelings on the subject we should find that it was not so much the blackguard who was in question as our own morbid sensibility. We--that is the ones who live on the labour of others,--the small minority who, feasting on the deck of the ship of western civilisation which is being steered straight for the abyss--have sunk into what Schiller called "_der weichlichen Schoss der Verfeinerung_" our hyperaesthesia has grown so morbid that every stripe we see administered raises a weal on ourselves. This is a condition perilously near that in which the contemplation of suffering becomes the sole channel of pleasure, for morbid sensibility and cruelty have usually hobn.o.bbed at the same inn. It is the healthy man who does not shrink from either enduring or inflicting necessary pain.

The Raad was dissolved--dismissed with my blessing which, however, I felt constrained to express in more or less guarded terms. I regarded that body with deep and sincere admiration. It might be of incalculable benefit to the British Empire if the speakers of the respective parliaments of the self-governing Colonies, led by the speaker of the House of Commons, were to visit the Richtersveld and sit on that arid hillside listening to the Raad's deliberations. I should be prepared personally to conduct the tour.

With the Vicar's kind a.s.sistance I proceeded with the necessary preparations for my gold-seeking adventure. He lent me some carpenter's tools, and I soon altered a small gin-case I had brought into a very fair imitation of a gold-digger's cradle. The next step was to hire two pack-oxen and secure the services of a few labourers. On the following morning we would start for the supposed El Dorado. In the meantime I again called on my interesting friend the Vicar, drank some more of his excellent coffee, and, after contributing according to my means towards the building fund of the unfinished church, bade my host a cordial farewell.

It was a quaint caravan which next morning scarped the north-eastern shoulder of the T'Oums Mountain, in search of El Dorado. The guide--a little, wizened creature, certainly more than half Bushman--and I, led the procession. Next came the pack-oxen, conducted by their respective owners, but generally under Hendrick's charge. The loads were miscellaneous in character, but not heavy. They comprised my bedding, provisions, delving tools and receptacles for such reptiles, insects and plants as we might find it worth while to collect. From the top of one load the handle of the cradle pointed towards heaven--or rather it would have had it not swayed so much from the gait of the ox. I wished for a small flag to attach to it. Next came a mixed crowd, about twenty in number. These were mere camp followers, but they insisted on accompanying me. They included men, women and children. Among the latter were two ape-like babies, slung on their mothers' backs.

Andries, for the time, had remained behind with the wagon.

The track was unexpectedly good; much better in fact than the one over which we had travelled before reaching Kuboos. To the left, in the direction of the Orange River, the scenery was comparatively tame,--that is to say it looked as though one might pa.s.s over the country without inevitably breaking one's neck. But to the right lay chaos, confused and t.i.tanic. The strata were completely inverted--in some instances almost turned upside down. But the general suggestion was as though several miles of the earth's surface-crust had been placed on end. The soft layers had disappeared; the hard remained standing. Alternate deep chasms and jutting, mountainous b.u.t.tresses of rock were the consequence.

That sickle-bend must have been the result of a tremendous cosmic upheaval--an earth-throe which flung aside like a wisp the from thirty to forty miles of double mountains bounding the then-steep river gorge.

A good deal of the former surface of the bend had disappeared. Then the river, no longer a captive in adamant bonds (as it still is farther inland) doubtless took advantage of the unstable conditions brought about by the cataclysm, laid hands on the shattered earth-ribs and hurled them, piecemeal, from its path. So that there, although the mountains were even loftier than those farther to the eastward, they did not press upon the river as though trying to strangle it.

So far as I could make out El Dorado was about twenty miles from Kuboos.

As we proceeded the track improved. The guide now calmly informed me that we had pa.s.sed the worst of it. Therefore all the trouble and expense of hiring the pack-oxen and their owners was unnecessary. Here evaporated another illusion; these people had developed business instincts; the serpent of guile had found its way even to the Richtersveld paradise. I scribbled a note asking Andries to follow on our spoor with the wagon. This note I sent back by one of the camp followers.

It was fairly late in the afternoon when we reached our destination.

The guide pointed out to me the exact spot where the nugget was alleged to have been picked up. It was on the side of a little gully which scarred the terraced bank of the dry T'Cuidabees River. The bedrock was of soft shale; it almost protruded from the surface, so spa.r.s.e was the covering soil. There was no such thing as "wash" in the ordinary sense, but merely earth to the depth of a few inches, with which a good many angular quartz pebbles were mixed. I had once found gold, in an almost exactly similar formation, at a spot in the north-eastern Transvaal.