Tales of South Africa

Right below us, ringed in by a perfect amphitheatre of mountain, lay an oval sheet of water, its smooth surface, unruffled by a flaw of wind, shining beneath the ardent sunlight like the mirror of a giantess. This vlei – the long-lost vlei, undoubtedly – was about half a mile long by three hundred yards in breadth. Here and there upon the placid water floated troops of wildfowl; and high in the air hung a fishing-eagle or two, keenly intent upon sport beneath. Immediately below us, the lake seemed deep; but towards the far end, it evidently shallowed, and upon one side of that end grew dense masses of reeds. The shores, save where the reed-beds grew, were in places sandy; elsewhere, of rock. Between the water and the mountain sides, which sloped easily downward, and were well bushed, was an outer ring of reddish soil, masked by a park-like growth of scattered acacia thorns. It was now the month of August, and getting towards African spring-time, and, favoured doubtless by the neighbourhood of the vlei, the acacias were already putting forth a pleasant bravery of green leafage. Birds – many of them of brilliant plumage – were in plenty about this gem-like spot. It seemed that here in this secret place Nature had done her utmost to atone for much of the drought and hardship that at this season lay in the wilderness outside.

For five minutes we stood gazing with a sense of rapture at this goodly scene. We looked keenly hither and thither, but could discern no trace of human existence. Then we descended. We reached the water without great difficulty; upon its margin we lay down and drank long and eagerly. Having thus refreshed ourselves, and eaten some of the little store of food we had brought with us, we set out to explore the vlei thoroughly. The chief thing in our minds was to ascertain the fate of Tobias Steenkamp, whether living or dead. And first we settled to search systematically the side upon which we stood. We looked carefully for traces of spoor, yard by yard along the sand fringing the water. Not a footprint could we discover. Once or twice we came across the tracks of klipspringers and leopards, but no sign of human life was there. We turned back, and searched among the groves of thorny acacia, now fragrant with the strong scent of the rich sweet blossoms, but with the same ill success. It was now late in the afternoon; we passed round the end of the vlei, skirted the reed-bed, and then came upon more rocky formation. It was here that I first convinced myself of the gold-bearing richness of the valley. In a crevice of rock, time-worn by long ages of water-wear and decay, I picked up three smallish nuggets. I am afraid this success rather threw us off the search for Tobias Steenkamp, of which we had already begun to despair. Several times during the day we had raised our voices and hallooed loudly, in faint hopes of an answer. The cliffs eagerly returned us echo after echo, but there was nought else. For the rest of the short afternoon time we scrambled about the rocks, peering into crannies and basins. We had fair success, and by evening had between us gathered some fourteen ounces of gold, all in nuggets.

It was now sundown; already the pelicans had arrived, and were sailing about the sky in marvellous intricacies; the light was going fast, and we must prepare to camp for the night. We had told our men at the wagons not to expect us till next day; they would be therefore under no anxiety. We picked a place not far from the water, where the view was open, and danger from the approach of night ferae minimised. We chose a smooth sandy spot under a wall of rock. In front we made two good fires, and then, having eaten a scant supper, we sat smoking and talking beneath the warm starlight. It was about nine o’clock; we were both becoming drowsy, when Du Plessis suddenly sat bolt upright and listened breathlessly. “Did you hear that?” he whispered in a low, intense voice. “No,” I said, sinking my voice too, for the man’s strange demeanour rather awed me.

“I heard a man groan – or a spook,” he said.

Now, I am not a believer in spooks at any time; yet it was a wild, eerie place, and the senses of these Boer hunters are so preternaturally quickened by long acquaintance with savage life, that I knew Koenraad must have heard something.

I listened intently, and again we both heard a faint groan, as of a man in pain.

“Allemaghte!” whispered Du Plessis, “what, in the name of the Heer God, can it be?” A moment later he clutched me by the arm, and pointing with his right hand, whispered fiercely: “Look! look!”

The moon was now up and shining brightly, and the valley had passed from the dimness of the starlight. I looked where the Boer was pointing, and saw something that sent a shiver down my back. Certainly there was a shapeless something crawling slowly towards the water on our left front, one hundred and fifty yards away. Again came the faint groan we had heard.

“This is bosh,” I said. “It’s a man, undoubtedly, and he’s in pain. It may be your cousin. Come and look.” I sprang to my feet, picked up my revolver, and started off. Du Plessis pulled himself together – he had need, for he was a firm believer in spooks – and followed closely. We approached the creeping thing – it looked more like a man. I hailed it, and again a low groan came. We reached the dark object. It was a man, or the remains of one, emaciated, half-clad in tattered rags; and it crawled upon all-fours, dragging one leg. It was not a Boer – not Tobias Steenkamp. In a flash it came into my mind that here was the second figure, of my strange dream.

“Who are you?” I said.

“Water, for God’s sake!” was all the poor wretch could utter. I ran to the water, filled the top of my felt hat, and came back. The tattered figure drank eagerly.

“Come, Du Plessis,” I said; “let’s carry him up to the camp-fire.”

We picked the poor framework up, and carried it to the fire; it weighed, I suppose, about five stone. Then we got out Du Plessis’ flask, poured out some brandy, mashed up some biscuit and water with it, and administered the mess out of the flask cup. The brandy seemed to revive the poor creature. We gave him a piece of billtong to suck, and at last he spoke.

“I know your face,” he said, looking at me; “don’t you remember Spanish Jack?”

Of course I remembered Spanish Jack, a well-known prospector in the Eastern Transvaal some few years before. Three parts English, one part Spanish, he was one of those restless pioneers who move, Uhlan-like, before the main body of the gold-diggers, always on the hunt for new finds. Looking at the poor death’s-head before me, I could only recognise, in the dark, cavernous eyes and the mass of tangled black hair, the faintest traces of the strong, restless, dare-devil prospector known as Spanish Jack.

“How did you come here?” I queried, and in the same instant, “What’s become of Tobias Steenkamp?” asked Du Plessis in Dutch.

“Give me a drop more brandy,” answered the man in a hoarse whisper, “and I’ll tell you.”

We gave him part of our small remaining stock, with some water, and he went on, speaking, however, with great difficulty.

“I was up in these parts with a donkey and a bit of an outfit four years ago, and I heard from a nigger that a Dutchman had got into this place; and, after a lot of trouble, I found my way in too, from another direction, nor’-east there. I had some grub, and I meant to camp for a week, as alluvial gold was wonderfully plentiful. On the fifth day after I got here, Tobias Steenkamp turned up. It was the second and last trip he made. He was mad to find me here, and told me it was his place, and I was to clear. We quarrelled; he struck me, and in my rage I out with my knife and stabbed him in the chest. He died within an hour. You will find his bones along there under a bit of a cairn near the water. Well, after that I only wanted to get out of the place. I took what gold I had picked up, and started up the mountain again. In my hurry I was careless; I fell, broke my right thigh, and here I have been ever since. My leg healed in a rough sort of way; but there’s a false joint; the bone kept coming away, and I could never walk properly again. I managed to pick up food by snaring fowl and catching fish; but latterly I’ve been too weak to do that. For the last month I’ve been slowly starving. Lizards and roots are what I’ve lived on – that’s God’s truth. My leg’s been getting worse, and I’ve had to crawl, mostly, these last three months. I never expected to reach the water again after to-night, and then I think I should have pinched out. Time enough, too. This place has been worse than hell itself.”

There was a hunted terror in the man’s eye that implied more than his words. I doubted somehow whether I had heard the plain truth. The poor wretch was by this time exhausted, and could say no more. I gave him, at his request, a piece of tobacco; he clapped it into his cheek, and thought he could doze a bit.

I turned to Du Plessis, who had meanwhile, with very grim looks, edged away from the man who, he understood from me (I had translated the gist of the prospector’s story), had slain his cousin. His feeling of vengeance was strong – remember, he was but a primitive Transvaal Boer; but what could even he say, as we looked at this poor travesty of a man, this living skeleton, with its broken, deformed leg, that now slept, huddled up to the fire as closely as the starved Bushman of the Kalahari?

It was now late, and Du Plessis and I, too, lay down and slept; the day had been long and hard, and we were dog-tired. The dawn was cold; and coatless, almost shirtless, as I was, I awoke early, very stiff and sore. Du Plessis had a cord coat on; he yet slept soundly, and even snored. But the figure across the fire seemed very still. I moved quietly to it, touched it gently. It was stiff and cold. Spanish Jack’s troubles and agonies were over; his prospecting was done; and for the blood upon his hands he would never answer upon this earth. Whether he died from the excitement of the meeting; whether that last agonising journey to the water had spent the remaining flicker of strength left within him; whether the story he had told us of Tobias Steenkamp’s death was the true one, I cannot tell.

I roused Du Plessis. Together we went down towards the vlei and found the pile of stones, where, surely enough, the bones of a tall man – undoubtedly Tobias Steenkamp – lay. These we carefully replaced; then, exploring up-hill from where we had come upon the prospector, we found a cave or hollow in which the poor wretch had evidently made a home. Here were Steenkamp’s hat and hunting-knife, among other remnants; and here, too, a pile of nuggets, no doubt collected by Spanish Jack. These nuggets, with a small skin bag partly full of gold-dust, washed, no doubt, from the sands of the vlei – a small tin digger’s pan of Spanish Jack’s showed us that – we took with us. After that, we buried the dead prospector as well as we could, piled big stones above his rude grave, and quitted the place.

We had no wish to tarry there, fair as was the spot. Rather the grim associations of the vlei, the deed of blood enacted there, and the melancholy death we had been witnesses of, impelled us away from it.

After much toil, we safely reached our wagons late that afternoon, worn and famished. We had, somehow, no wish to bequeath to others the secret of the vlei. Having safely descended by the rope, therefore, we set about destroying our traces. Two of our boys were waiting for us at the bottom of the ravine. With these we took a united haul at the rope. The strain was great; the rope parted, as we had expected, far up the cliff, where the hide riems joined the rope itself, and no vestige of our means of descent remained to searchers from below. Next day we trekked from the neighbourhood. The gold we had found realised, some months later, seven hundred pounds, which Du Plessis and I divided between us.

Verloren Vlei, with its smiling face, its dark history, and its wealth of gold – for gold must be there in abundance – lies, I believe, to this day still a secret and an unknown place. No doubt the pelicans and the sand-grouse that first revealed its mysteries to Tobias Steenkamp and ourselves, still visit it in time of drought – towards the driest period of African winter. Some day, I suppose, its recesses will be made accessible and its wealth laid bare. For others that day may come; but for ourselves, neither Koenraad du Plessis nor I have any wish – having prospered in other directions – to tempt fortune there again.

Chapter Two.

A Bushwoman’s Romance

Nakeesa, the Bushwoman, awoke just as dawn crept upon the silent veldt. She belonged to that strange houseless race of wild hunters who roam the waterless, illimitable deserts of the North Kalahari, subsisting sometimes on game, at other times upon roots, reptiles, and berries.

It is needless to say that Nakeesa lay roofless. A little screen of branches, interwoven with a friendly bush, sheltered her and her sleeping husband and her child from the chill south wind that just now began to move through the desert. It was June – midwinter – and the night had been keen even to frostiness – so cold that Nakeesa had lain almost in the fire through the long hours. Her short hartebeest-skin cloak, and the tiny skin petticoat about her loins, only half protected her gaunt, three-quarter starved frame. The baby had nestled in the warmest corner of her cloak, as near to the fire as might be without burning. So close had Nakeesa lain to the pleasant warmth, that the shins of her poor bony legs were burnt raw, as they had been for weeks past. Her man, Sinikwe, lay scorched in exactly the same way.

You may never, indeed, see a Masarwa Bushman or woman who does not show marks of fire-burn upon the nether limbs. Among the old people, if you look close enough, you may see that their wrinkled breasts and bellies are scorched and raw also.

Nakeesa sat up, pushed a half-burned stick or two into the smouldering fire, and looked about her. Sinikwe lay still asleep. There was no need to wake him, and, indeed, he would resent such interference. She looked about her in a dull, rather hopeless way. There was no food in the camp – if camp it could be called. Sinikwe had shot or snared no meat of late. Drought lay upon the desert, and game was scarce. In a little while she must be digging for roots in the hard sunbaked soil, and her babe would be crying at her lean, starved breast. All day yesterday had she been sucking water from a moist hole in the ground, and discharging it from her mouth into ostrich shells and a calabash – a sufficiently fatiguing operation in thirsty soil. But these things alone hardly troubled Nakeesa. They were natural incidents of Bushman life, and scarce needed regrets. Something deeper and more bitter lay within her soul – something that even her cowed, submissive nature constantly rebelled against.

Twelve months since, Nakeesa’s father had handed her over to Sinikwe, who, for the consideration of two solid brass cartridge cases (articles much prized by Masarwas as snuff-boxes) and the half of a slain eland, had bought her as wife. Now Nakeesa had no great admiration for Sinikwe. He was a good hunter, it was true; all Masarwas are. But he was lazy, and not very amiable; he was ugly even for a Bushman; and she had had another youth in her eye. Kwaneet – the pleasant, merry Kwaneet – who had shown her several little kindnesses at Makwa Pool, and had presented her with many titbits of flesh, while their respective families squatted near that water, was the man of her secret choice.

Kwaneet, too, knew this, and was anxious to link his fortunes with Nakeesa’s; but, most unfortunately, Sinikwe had acquired the coveted cartridge cases from an English hunter, and had secured his wife. Kwaneet, it is true, could easily have slain an eland, and had offered to do so; but though, like Sinikwe, he carried at his neck – as every decent Masarwa should – his own well-polished brass cartridge case, as snuff-box, he had not two spare ones to offer Nakeesa’s father; and so he had lost Nakeesa, and Sinikwe had taken her.

Nakeesa’s eyes, as she squatted over the fire this morning, ranged over typical Kalahari scenery. In front of her lay an open grassy clearing, yellow with sun-parched winter grass. This and other glades in the vicinity Sinikwe meant to set fire to in a day or two, in order to renew the vegetation, as the first rains came on, and so attract the game. Beyond the clearing, and upon the left hand and right, stretched the pleasant open forest of the desert – groves of giraffe-acacia (kameel doorn), through which still wander freely in these pathless, waterless solitudes the tall giraffe, the portly eland, the brilliant red hartebeest, and the noble gemsbok (prototype of the fabled unicorn).

This Kalahari forest scenery, flat though it is, is very beautiful, resembling closely some English deer park, or the natural woodland of some wild Surrey common.

The deep red glow of sunrise was now apparent through the trees to the eastward, long streamers of rose-pink flew upwards in the pale sky; a roller or two, brilliant in gorgeous colouring of metallic mauves and violets, purples, blues, and greens, began to cry amid the forest, and to flash hither and thither across the clearing. Dainty steinboks and timid duykers (small antelopes, quite independent of water, to be found all over the desert) rose stiff from their cold night couches, shook themselves, and began to feed.

Suddenly a movement to the right attracts Nakeesa’s attention. She looks again, and an involuntary click of surprise and pleasure rises to her tongue. She touches her man lightly. Sinikwe is awake and upon his haunches in an instant; his narrow, bleared eyes seek what Nakeesa has seen, and they watch together in a motionless silence.

From behind a spreading acacia tree, from which it has been plucking the green leafage, strides into a little glade of the grove a great cow giraffe. She is fat and fresh, her dappled, orange-tawny hide gleams under the now risen sun with high condition, her great, melting, dark eye is placid and free from fear. Timid creature though she is, in these wilds she feels secure enough. She halts for a minute in the glade, lazily champing at a bit of acacia leafage which projects from her lips, and, raising her immense neck yet higher, and in the same motion swinging her head easily round, looks behind for her fellows. That giraffe cow, so plump, so well coloured, upon which Sinikwe’s eye is now fiercely rivetted, is young, but full grown. She measures seventeen good feet from the base of her hoofs to the tip of her false horns, as she stands there, and you may search all Africa – ay, all the world – for a more wonderful, more beautiful picture of feral life in its most primaeval form.

There is no air of wind blowing from the Masarwas towards the giraffe; the breeze trends rather the other way, and they are safe from betrayal by that foe. They are concealed from sight by the screen of bush beneath which they crouch, and a few handfuls of sand, cast by Sinikwe upon the smouldering fire, silently destroys that evidence of human life.

In another minute the great creature swings her head round, satisfied that her fellows are near, and stalks slowly on. She is but sixty yards away now, and, passing another group of trees and some bush, emerges upon the open glade. Before she has reached the further side, the rest of the troop are to be seen following in her wake. There are six of them in all: a mighty dark chestnut bull, nineteen feet tall, three more cows, and two calves. The beautiful giants stride like strange automatons across the clearing, with that gliding, deceptive walking pace of theirs, and join the leader at a great spreading acacia, from which they all begin to pluck, with upstretched necks and prehensile tongues, the dark-green foliage.

Sinikwe’s eyes had greedily followed the great cow in all her movements. That is the quarry he means to strike for. Luckily he had smeared his tiny bone-tipped reed arrows with fresh poison taken from the entrails of the N’gwa caterpillar only yesterday. He now picks up his bow and quiver, slings the latter across his back, and steals away by a circuitous route to intercept the troop. It is three hours before he gets his shot. At length, after infinite patience and manoeuvring, he has wormed himself into a patch of thick bush, by which, as he had reckoned, the great cow would pass. Stooping on one knee, he harbours there, motionless as some bizarre figure of bronze; the cow glides past, like some great desert ghost; Sinikwe lets fly his arrow deep into the thinnest part of her tough hide, under the hinder part of the belly; the startled creature flies crashing through the forest, and the Masarwa knows that with her death is now only a question of hours. It may be a day, or two days, or even three, but the poison already at work is fresh and at its deadliest; the arrowhead went well home, and the cow is his.

He returns to Nakeesa, gives her the news, and sends her into the grass veldt to dig up roots, while he himself prepares to make snuff. Taking her babe on her back, neatly slung in her skin cloak, Nakeesa hies her to a likely spot. She takes also with her an empty tortoiseshell in which to bring home the bulbs, and a sharp-pointed stick garnished at top with a circular piece of soft stone. With this last implement she can the more easily crow up their dinner.

Out there in the hot sun Nakeesa patiently digs and digs, slowly accumulating the dish of roots. The red sandy soil is now burning hot to the touch; there is no inch of shade from the scorching sun, and she has not tasted food or water for twenty hours. These things trouble the Bushwoman not at all; they have always been a part of her existence, and she cannot imagine a world without toil and heat, hunger and thirst. Just now, too, she is somewhat comforted at the thought of a mighty feast of meat in the not distant future. Sinikwe is lazy, and time after time neglects to hunt game when Kwaneet – Kwaneet is often in her mind – would have brought in good store of flesh. But Sinikwe, to give him his due, is as good a hunter and spoorer as any in the wide Kalahari, if the game is nigh and not far to seek. She knows that the giraffe is as good as dead, that soon, for a few brief days, she may revel in a gross plenty, and that her babe will be less petulant again. In two hours Nakeesa has filled the tortoiseshell and returns to her man.

Sinikwe, meanwhile, has been having an easy time, preparing a fresh supply of snuff against his coming spooring operations and the feast that is to follow. Out of the dead fire he has extracted some ash from a particular sort of bush which he put in last night. This he works down to the finest possible consistency. Taking from a leather pouch a tiny piece of tobacco – the precious gift of a Lake trader – he cuts off a piece, and in turn reduces that to fine dust by means of flat stones. Then carefully mingling the ashes and the tobacco dust, and again grinding them down together, his snuff is made. With this prized commodity he can refresh his jaded senses upon a difficult spoor, titillate his nerves after a big gorge of flesh, and purchase the pleased glances of his wife when in his bounty he shall deign to bestow a pinch or two upon her. Besides his snuff-making, an operation demanding the gravest care, Sinikwe has sharpened up the blade of his only spear, at once his weapon of defence, carver and skinning-knife, to the haft of which he has fastened his skin cloak and a small calabash of water in preparation for the journey before him. He has sharpened, too, his primitive hatchet, used for chopping bones and extracting marrow. That hatchet – the head of iron, the haft of rhinoceros horn – is Sinikwe’s most treasured possession. His father acquired it long since, at infinite cost of feathers and ivory from the Bechuana who fashioned it.

Presently Nakeesa comes in, and the roots – curious little smooth bulbs, sweet and nutty to the taste – are divided, three-fourths to Sinikwe, one-fourth to Nakeesa. These bulbs are bestowed in thin transparent crops taken from dead guinea-fowls, which are now softened in water for the purpose. A skewer of wood is run throughout several; in half an hour the sun has again dried these curious receptacles, and the Bushman’s bread supply is complete. Taking his lion’s share of the food, and munching a few bulbs before he departs, Sinikwe now exchanges with his wife a few sentences in that curious, whining, inarticulate form of speech peculiar to the Bushman, every passage of it as full of clicks as tongue, throat, teeth, and palate can make it; shoulders his belongings, and sets off briskly upon the spoor of the wounded giraffe.

Nakeesa is to follow him at leisure; she will, you may swear, be up at the carcase long before Sinikwe has made much havoc with it. But she has to carry more water and the child, and will take her own time. She devours a few bulbs and then goes to the water-pit. At present there is no water there, only some moist sand in a deep hollow. But Nakeesa knows what she is about. To the end of a hollow reed she has fastened a tuft of grass. This she inserts into the damp hole which she scoops from the sand. Then she kneads sand round the base of her rude pump and over the tuft of grass and sucks. Little by little the water thus collected reaches and fills her mouth, from which it is discharged, by means of a thick stalk of desert grass, into an ostrich shell. It is hard work and slow, but in two hours Nakeesa has filled her three remaining ostrich shells. These and some others, the holes of which are all carefully sealed with grass, she bestows in a rude net of fibre.

With this load, together with a calabash of water, her babe, her larder and household gear (the bulbs, a steinbok skin, and the tortoiseshell), she sets off on her way towards that banquet of giraffe flesh for which her soul now pines. It is a long, long journey, but she has no trouble whatever in following Sinikwe’s spoor. She traces it to the spot where the Masarwa set off upon the tracks of the wounded cow, and then, mile after mile through the desert, she deciphers easily the familiar tale that slowly the earth unfolds to her. The giraffe is strong and lusty, and the poison takes long to do its work upon so huge a frame.

Nakeesa toils on doggedly with her load. She sleeps the first night (she started in the afternoon) in a belt of Mopani forest. At earliest dawn, as soon as she can see spoor, she is away again steadily trudging. It is weary work. The white glare of the sun upon the light calcareous sand, through which she ploughs all morning, is trying enough; yet infinitely more distressing is it when she crosses the four miles of a vast salt pan. The blinding glare thrown up from the flat white surface of the pan makes even the seasoned eyes of a Bushwoman throb and smart, and the heat is terrible.

There is a gleam of satisfaction even upon the salt pan, however. Nakeesa sees plainly enough by the spoor that the giraffe cow is in sore trouble. Here she has reeled, there spurned the smooth white sand as she starts off again at speed, galled into frenzy by the poison that now runs riot through her veins. And ever, like bloodhound upon a trail, run the footprints of Sinikwe side by side with the giraffe spoor. Nakeesa sees that he has put on his hide sandals, so burning is the glittering white sand. So plain is the tale to her eyes that Nakeesa knows now surely enough that to-morrow by noon she will rest by the dead carcase.