CHAPTER XIV
PERMIT FOR THE FORBIDDEN GAME RESERVE—VAN REENEN AND THE SCORPION—SECOND VISIT TO THE GREAT FALLS—OLD GERT, OUR GUIDE—BUSHMAN ARROWS AND THEIR POISONS—BUSHMAN INOCULATION AGAINST SNAKE-BITE—ANTIDOTE FOR SNAKE-BITE—TALES OF “THE GREAT THIRST.”
The trip had given time for certain preliminary plans to mature, and immediately on my return I made a formal application to the Department of Mines for permission to enter the Kalahari Game Reserve, and bring out proof of the existence there of certain diamond-mines.
I pointed out my reasons for holding the belief of their existence, also that the country was badly in need of revenue, and that the Premier Mine had that year contributed no less than £600,000 to the Union’s finances.
And, I argued, there might easily be several “Premiers” awaiting discovery in the Kalahari, and to find them would not cost the Government one penny; for, given the desired permission, I would find the necessary finances myself. All I stipulated was “Discoverer’s Rights” (half the mine) should I bring out the proof—so that the Union Government stood to win half a diamond-mine to nothing over the transaction. As I fully anticipated, the Department of Mines didn’t see how it could be done! The territory mentioned was “forbidden” to prospectors, no one was allowed to enter it, it was the breeding-place of Royal game, no one had ever been granted such a permit, etc.—all of which I had acknowledged in my application. And finally—and best reason of all—the Mines Department added that in any case the Reserve wasnot under its jurisdiction, being still in the hands of the Cape Provincial Council, and the Administrator; Sir Frederick de Waal. This gentleman being unfortunately absent on tour, I was again hung up; but I made another formal application to him, and strove to possess my soul in patience, what time letters and wires from Upington urged me to “get a move on,” for heavy thunder rain had fallen in the desert, and t’samma would soon make the trip possible.
As I firmly believed in my ability to obtain the permit sooner or later, I made arrangements for waggons, stores, etc., to be in readiness, and retained the guide I have previously mentioned, and another one in Upington, whom my energetic friend there had been months in tracing, and had finally secured.
But alas! “the best-laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley!” as this one did; for after a long, long wait I received a point-blank refusal from His Honour the Administrator, who again informed me that the Kalahari Game Reserve was “closed to prospecting” as it was the “breeding-place of Royal game.”
Now, I am as good a sportsman as the next man, and a firm believer in game-preserving, but considering that I did not propose to ever need more than a square mile or so of the (approximately) ten thousand square miles given over to the Reserve, this harping on the rights of a few gemsbok to keep me from a fortune only made me more determined to get it, and I again went to the Department of Mines—this time with more success.
At any rate I this time obtained a sympathetic hearing, and finally, after many rebuffs and months of delay, during which waggons, horses, oxen, and guides were “eating their heads off,” I had the supreme satisfaction of obtaining the desired permission. In it the Honourable the Minister of Mines agreed to allow me to enter the Reserve for a period of three months, to start from the date I left Upington, to search for the “supposed pipe,” conditional that I undertook the work on behalf of the Government,and at my own expense, etc. etc.; also that a policeman should accompany me on the trip, and that I paid half his salary during the period he was with me.
The latter gratuitously humiliating condition was afterwards withdrawn, as it was found impossible to arrange for a camel police trooper to be spared for the work, and I and my assistants were graciously given permission to proceed without such escort.
By this time it was the end of September 1912; over six months had been taken in obtaining the permit, the t’samma season had come and gone, and the torrid heat of a Kalahari summer was at hand. It would therefore have been madness to attempt the expedition until some months had elapsed and young t’samma had again made its appearance—for upon the precarious patches of these little wild melons we should have to rely for a substitute for water, in this wild stretch of parched sand-dunes. Anxiously we therefore waited through the long summer days of October, November, and December, for news of the first rains, and it was not until January 1913 that news came from Gordonia that the first t’samma was beginning to make its appearance, and that it was considered safe for us to start.
One of our guides had most inconsiderately died whilst waiting, but the other, with waggons and trek animals, drivers, “boys,” etc., still awaited us, and on January 26th, 1913, our little party left Cape Town for Prieska and Upington, where lay our transport.
I had two partners, E. Telfer, a young and enthusiastic Scotsman of many years’ Colonial experience, and W. van Reenen, a still younger Cape Dutchman. Both were seasoned men, and though the desert would be new to them, they were both good shots, good horsemen, and thoroughly versed in farming, transport, and veldt craft, and I had little fear as to their ability to see the thing through. Our outfit was chosen with great care, for we knew that, once away from Upington, our waggon would be the only source of supplies—food, arms, ammunition,clothing, tools, and above all, medicine. As we hoped to establish a water depot within transport distance of the nearest well, we had a number of specially constructed tanks made—designed especially to pack on camel or oxen—but these, unfortunately, were of no use to us.
At Prieska all this paraphernalia was transferred to transport-waggons, whilst with our lighter gear we hurried on to Upington to prepare for the real desert trek.
The monotony of the Prieska to Upington trail has been referred to before in these pages, and a description of it would be of little interest. The drought had not broken here for many months; in the tiny village of Marydale no shower had fallen for two years, and hour after hour we trotted through a brown, dreary, dusty, verdureless expanse, where never a blade of grass or a green leaf could be seen as far as the eye could reach.
Carcasses of horses, mules, oxen, and other animals lay by the road every mile or so, and spoke rather too eloquently of the toll the terrible drought was taking upon the transport animals, and the flocks and herds of the farmer. Our driver gave us gruesome accounts of farms whose owners had neglected to trek with their livestock whilst the veldt still held good, but had waited, hoping for the ever-promising rain, waited until their last drop of water had dried in their vleys, wells, or pits, and every nibble of herbage had been cleared off the face of the land, and who had lost every head of stock they possessed. Transport was almost unobtainable, for every pound of forage for the animals for the long trek of 150 miles had to be carried on the waggons, leaving room for little else! Water, even at the regular watering-places, was so scarce that a heavy charge was made for each animal drinking, and it seemed that, if the drought did not break very soon, the route would have to be utterly abandoned.
And day after day the heavy storm clouds gathered, dark, lowering, and threatening (or rather promising)torrents of the longed-for rain, a promise that seemed never to be fulfilled. This gloomy state of affairs was by no means encouraging, and our driver, when he found out where we were bound for, laughed, and told us that we were mad to make the attempt. He said that the farmers between Upington and Rietfontein had suffered worse than any others, and that a bare week ago he had spoken to a camel policeman from the north, who had told him that not a drop of rain had yet fallen, and there would be no t’samma! So we were most anxious to get to Upington, to find out the truth, for this gloomy account was an entirely different story from the cheery optimism of the recent letters and wires we had received.
Apparently, however, whatever might have happened in the Kalahari during the last few months, it was certainly raining there now, for as we got farther north, the whole horizon in that direction appeared covered with a dense bank of clouds, from which lightning frequently flashed. It seemed as though a perfect deluge must be falling there, and we took heart of grace, and even wished we had brought our mackintoshes.
The evening before arriving at Upington van Reenen had a nasty experience. We had outspanned at a spot only a few hours from Upington, and had made a large fire in order to roast a porcupine van Reenen had shot earlier in the day. It was nearly nightfall, and the sky was dark and lowering, whilst distant thunder could be heard northward. As we sat by the camp fire, a sudden gust of wind scattered the embers in all directions, and this was but the prelude to a furious gale that came tearing along at whirlwind speed, bearing with it not only embers, but hats, kettles, big flaming branches from the fire, and almost blinding us with a thick cloud of dust. The morsels of porcupine went flying into the cinders, and thence all over the veldt, as the wind whisked the heart of the fire away; through the blast of sand and small stones came a few drops of rain, and a vivid flash of lightning, with a simultaneous peal ofheavy thunder right over us, showed that we were in for one of the sudden storms peculiar to the place and season. In a few minutes it was pitch dark, and we were scuttling all over the place, in a vain endeavour to retrieve all sorts of belongings that the wind had snatched away even from the shelter of the waggon. In a quarter of an hour the worst was over, though still the wind howled across the shelterless veldt, and we began to collect the scattered firebrands, and built another fire. Van Reenen, determined to sup off porcupine, crouched down by the embers, and began cooking fresh slivers of the rank-smelling meat, when suddenly the driver yelled topas op(look out), for the scorpions were “trekking.” Rain, or a heavy dust-storm, will always bring out these little pests in swarms from the holes and crevices in which they hide, and I knew that in such cases they simply ran “amok,” travelling with tail erect, looking for trouble, and lashing out at anything living that came in their way. But I was hardly prepared for what followed the driver’s warning, for within a minute or two the veldt was literally alive with the venomous little pests, numbers of them walking straight into the fire, where they squirmed and sizzled horribly. Van Reenen, intent on his cooking, only swore a little as he brushed one or two aside, and took them far too lightly, for suddenly a big black specimen ran along his bare arm, and stung him on the big vein on his wrist, causing him to drop the second lot of porcupine steak, and let off a yell that scared the whole camp.
There is nothing more painful than a bad scorpion-sting, but as a rule they are not particularly dangerous. This, however, was an exception, for the symptoms that followed were alarming in the extreme. As quickly as possible the sting was scarified and treated with permanganate of potash, but within a few minutes the arm had swollen to an enormous size; and although I bound a ligature tightly above the wound, the glands of the neck, arm-pit, and groin became similarly affected, the jaw stiffened, and othermost alarming symptoms showed themselves. Van Reenen was almost mad with pain, and, strong as he was, he was soon in a state almost of collapse.
We had a small bottle of brandy, and this we poured down him at once, without the least effect, and for hours we walked him up and down, to prevent him from falling into the deadly stupor that followed the first effect.
For days afterwards his right arm was quite useless, and the experience made him extremely nervous whenever scorpions took a hand in our proceedings, which was pretty often, for the desert swarms with them, and scarcely a morning passed but we found three or four of the venomous things snuggled in between our blankets and the sand on which we had lain.
We found the Orange at Upington extremely low, and even the favoured river-lands not wholly free from the effects of the drought.
News from the desert was very conflicting. The farmers were suffering badly, andveldtfor transport animals along the route to Rietfontein was practically non-existent, but most of them seemed to believe that heavy rains had fallen in the actual reserve eastward, to which we were bound.
Into this large tract of country no one ever went, except an occasional camel trooper, and their infrequent patrols did not extend farther than the large pans known as “Aar Pan,” “Gunga Pan” and “Betterstadt Pan,” which were said to lie about twenty miles from the western edge of the desert.
A patrol had passed that way about a month previously, and had seen no sign of rain having fallen, but Bushmen had reported that t’samma was flourishing farther east, and the only way to find out if such was the case was to go in and find out for ourselves.
Plant“CANDELABRA EUPHORBIA.”The Bushmen make arrow-poison from this.
“CANDELABRA EUPHORBIA.”The Bushmen make arrow-poison from this.
“CANDELABRA EUPHORBIA.”
The Bushmen make arrow-poison from this.
Guide“OLD GERT.”My guide in the Kalahari, and for many years a chief of Bushmen there.
“OLD GERT.”My guide in the Kalahari, and for many years a chief of Bushmen there.
“OLD GERT.”
My guide in the Kalahari, and for many years a chief of Bushmen there.
In Upington we were lucky in finding Lieutenant Geary, the officer in charge at Rietfontein, who was down on a holiday, and who very kindly filled in the approximate positions of the above-named pans on mymap, upon which the vast Game Reserve was simply a huge blank space, marked “Unexplored.” These pans he had visited himself on camel-back, and he was sceptical of our being able to reach them in any other manner. But camels, we found, were quite unobtainable in Gordonia, the Rietfontein police being the only people who had any, and they, it appeared, being so short that to lend us any was out of the question.
Meanwhile, as we had hopelessly out-distanced our heavy transport, and could not start till its arrival, we arranged a flying trip to the Great Falls, hoping to obtain a successful film of the wonderful cataract; for with an appreciation of the fact that we should be visiting places where not even a photograph had been taken before, we had obtained a cinematograph camera and many thousand feet of film.
Although the volume of water was not so great as on our previous visit, I was more impressed than ever with the solemn and desolate grandeur of the place, and above all with the fact of so much potential energy being absolutely unutilised, and the strange anomaly of a huge body of water, in a land where it is such a scarce and valuable commodity, running absolutely to waste.
The views were obtained with considerable difficulty, for, as I have before described, the Falls are very difficult of access, and to obtain a frontal view of them we had to operate the machine from a tiny ledge of rock overhanging the abyss at a great height, and so small that the third leg of the tripod-stand could find no footing, but hung out over the precipice, whilst the two of us operating hung on by our eyebrows to it and to the trembling rock. I was profoundly thankful when it was all over, and we were back on firm ground again, with what we hoped would prove a very fine and unique film.
This preliminary canter over, and once again in Upington, we settled down to preparations for the northward trek, for our heavy belongings hadarrived in our absence, and we were anxious for the road. Both guide and waggon were ready, the latter belonging to a young Dutchman named Gert du Toit, who was familiar with the fringes of the Reserve, and who was himself most anxious to accompany us; for he, too, had heard of, and believed in, the diamond-mine. And to give him his due at once, no better sportsman or companion have I ever roughed it with either in Africa or elsewhere.
Old Gert Louw, my guide, was a most remarkable old chap. Full of veldt lore, and at one time famed as a hunter, his knowledge of the Kalahari was unequalled. For many years of his young manhood he had been the chosen chief of all the Bushmen that wandered there, and knew every “pan” in the whole vast expanse.
He had no idea of his own age, but must have been well over ninety; but he was still alert, keen-eyed, and full of intelligence. But Bushman chief as he had been, old Gert was not a Bushman born. Son of a Boer father and a Hottentot mother, and born in the Kenhardt district, he had, whilst still a youth, wandered with other hunters into the Kalahari in search of ostrich feathers and skins, and there, joining a Bushman tribe, had eventually become their chief—apparently by the simple process of eliminating all his rivals by means of the flint-lock, with which he had been an unerring shot, and against which the poisoned arrows of the little Bush folk had very little chance.
Not that he despised the arrows altogether, but learned to shoot well with them, and had many a tale to tell of the myriad head of game that the little flint-pointed darts had brought down for him. He told me of the poisons the Bushmen used, poisons so virulent that a scratch from an arrow dipped in either of them meant death to man or beast within a few minutes. The huge “baviaan” spider provided one of these. Caught at a certain season, these venomous insects were pounded between stones, and the resultant paste exposed to the light of themoon for several nights before it was fit for the arrow-tips. Another favourite poison was made from the viscid juice of theCandelabra euphorbia, and this also was prepared with certain rites and observances in which the moon again figured. Both these poisons were so rapid in effect that the Bushmen, shooting at game with their arrows thus poisoned, made little effort to do more than pierce the animal’s skin, nor troubled to pursue their quarry, leisurely following the spoor in the certainty that the wounded animal would be found dead at no great distance. Peculiarly enough, these poisons, though so virulent, had no ill effect upon the flesh of the animal slain. These arrow’s were never used for war. For this the favourite poison was obtained from certain portions of a putrefying corpse, and, according to Old Gert, a man wounded with a war-shaft poisoned with this awful venom died horribly of lock-jaw almost immediately.
Even when iron was obtainable, it was rarely used for arrow-heads, the Bushmen preferring those of flint, agate, or bone, as the poisons were not so effective on the iron barbs.
The old man’s gnarled and wrinkled body was covered with scars, and he had a tale to tell of each. The raised tattoo marks upon his chest were tribal marks, given to him with weird ceremonies when he was admitted to the “blood brotherhood,” whilst directly over his heart was a circle of little cuts, showing where he had been inoculated with snake-venom and made immune from their bite. He described this as a fearful ordeal, under which men often died, but which, when they survived, “made them snakes themselves,” as he expressed it. Neither puff-adder, ringhals, cobra, or night-adder would attempt to bite a man thus transformed; and he claimed that, if he came near a snake, it would remain rigid, and allow him to handle it with impunity. Certainly he showed not the slightest fear of them, though I noticed he invariably carried the Hottentot antidote for snake-bite about with him. This antidoteis a small low bush with yellow flowers, found in the Kalahari—but nowhere very plentiful—the parts used being the dried roots and small twigs. The inoculation is carried out with the venom of the cobra, which is captured alive, and forced to bite the patient or novitiate over the region of the heart. Meanwhile he is held by two men, who watch him, and administer the antidote only in small doses, and when the poison seems likely to gain the mastery, they rub the perspiration which pours from him into the bite. In common with every Hottentot and Bushman ever met, Old Gert believed the sand-gecko to be the most deadly of all poisonous reptiles, though scientists assert that it is absolutely harmless!
He showed us a bite on his knee, which he solemnly asserted was made by one of these little lizards many years before, and which had nearly killed him, his whole body swelling, and his jaw being locked for days!
For many years the old pagan had been virtually King of the Kalahari Bushmen, with henchmen and wives galore, hunting the ostrich for its plumes, and the lynx, leopard, lion, and jackal for their valuable pelts, bringing in his commodities twice a year to the white men at Klaas Lucas Kraal, Kheis, or Griquatown, and returning with his waggons full of Manchester goods, sugar, coffee, and tobacco, and above all withdopsufficient for a glorious jamboree.
He told me many gruesome tales of the “Great Thirst” (the Kalahari), where even the Bushman is occasionally unwary enough to stray too far from t’samma and dies hideously of thirst. He had wandered northward to N’Gami, and westward to the wild coast near Portuguese territory, where the Kunene runs into the sea, and long before a German flag was ever hoisted in that north-western part of Damaraland. Once, after many days of trekking and half dead with thirst, he shot and wounded a bull eland, and following it, found water in a pit in a desert pan.
Drinking it, three of his four horses fell deadalmost at once. He and his companions got away, but no less than 43 out of the party of 46 Bastards following them were poisoned, the three who escaped being young children.
Dop, Hottentots, Bastards, and white men between them had long since wiped out his tribe of Bushmen, and the old man had settled down at Upington with a new tribe of children and grandchildren; but his heart’s desire was the desert, and he was frantically eager to be back among the dunes. He knew the pan where the other Bushman had picked up the diamonds; he knew also a pan where the garnets and carbon lay thick in a soft yellow matrix, which, by its description, could be nothing but “Kimberlite”; and, more remote than any of them, he knew a similar pan, where there was a big limestone capping, in which were dotted bright green stones innumerable.
I showed Old Gert my collection of stones, and he picked out my one tiny emerald unhesitatingly from among half a dozen others—green gems, peridotes, green garnets, chrysophrase, tourmalines, etc.—and in addition described the precise crystallisation that the emerald takes.
Anderson was credited with having found emeralds in the Kalahari; I myself had picked up beryls—of which they are a variety—in abundance in German territory, west of where we were bound; and to add to the likelihood of there being emeralds as well as diamonds in this “Tom Tiddler’s Ground,” I heard from Mr. H. S. Harger, a well-known Johannesburg gem expert and geologist, who happened to be in Upington at the time, that some years back no less than £40,000 worth of fine rough emeralds had been sold in Hatton Garden—and that it was believed by all thecognoscentithat they came from the Kalahari!
On Saturday, February 17th, all was at length ready. We had discarded every bit of superfluous gear, and our waggons were packed with all that we expected to need during our long trip; our rifles and shot-guns hung from straps, ready to hand for thegame we hoped to kill along the path, and we were armed with an additional permit from the Resident Magistrate, authorising us to take these weapons into the Reserve—a permission which had been omitted in the Government permit, and without which the first police trooper we met would have promptly hauled us back in ignominy.