THE BUSHWOMAN.
The Bojesmāns or Bushmen are a most remarkable race. In one of my solitary rambles on Table Mountain, I came suddenly upon three of these people, who were squatting round a small fire in a cleft of the rock. Curiosity induced me to stop and look at them; they appeared to dislike my presence and scrutiny, and, as far as I could judge from the angry tone of their words and their suspicious glances, they were glad when I walked on.
The speech of the Bojesmāns is a most remarkable and extraordinary clack clack—unlike any other language under the sun, something resembling the striking together of harsh castanets. The sketch represents a Bushwoman; it is a portrait; she has a bunch of bulbs in her hand: they principally feed on roots and vegetables. Her attire is of leather; coloured beads are around her neck, her ear-rings are of ivory, a curious ornament is in front of her body, and her kraal or hut is in the distance.
In 1847, I saw four Bojesmāns who were exhibited at the Egyptian Hall; they were handsome specimens of their kind; the women were younger than the one represented in the sketch, still the peculiarity of the figure and the style of countenance stamp them of the same race.
A BUSHWOMAN.
On Stone by فاني پارکس
The following extract from Harris’s “Wild Sports of Southern Africa,” contains a most interesting description of the Bushmen:—
“At Kramers-fontein the next day, a horrible spectacle presented itself to us in the form of an emaciated old Bushwoman, who had come down from her kraal, five miles distant, to fill two ostrich eggs with water. ‘Grim misery had worn her to the bones,’ and it is no exaggeration to say that her attenuated form appeared a skeleton covered with a wet cloth. Those rounded proportions, which are given to the human form divine, had no existence in her. Her skin resembled wrinkled leather; and I can compare her legs and arms to nothing but straightened sticks, knobbed at the joints. Her body was actually crawling with vermin, with which she was constantly feeding a little half-inanimate miniature of herself in arms.
‘⸺Wither’d and wild in her attire,