He killed it, and walked about most of the rest of the night, though he came over and woke me up once and said, “Jonah!” and I believe that to this day he blames me for that scorpion and the puff-adder.
In the morning, however, we found that there had been another visitor during the night, the wet sand showing the spoor of an exceptionally big leopard, that had evidently been circling round our bivouac most of the night, his pad covering van Reenen’s footprint in several places.
From this spot we worked a few days eastward, locating a number of pans, in one of which we found extremely promising yellow ground, and we determined to bring tools, etc., to Aar Pan, and make an effort to properly test some of these places, especially as we found that more rain had fallen in this locality, and that the t’samma, which would make us independent of water, would soon be big enough to use. On this part of the trip, to enable us to cover long distances, we cut our equipment down to the very lowest: a rifle, twenty-five cartridges, knife, compass, matches, etc., and a quart water-bottle, carrying absolutely no food or cooking utensils. We used to shoot a steenbok, cook the liver and kidneys on sticks over the fire, and the head in the ashes for breakfast, and bury the legs in the embers till they were roasted dry, and sling the meat on to our belt. No bread, occasionally salt—from a pan—a big enough salt-cellar for a glutton! Occasionally we found a few tiny berries that the Bushmen eat, but mostly these are aromatic and bitter, and as there are poisonous varieties much resembling them, we usually left them severely alone. Spiny cucumbers were also beginning to appear, mostly intensely bitter, but also eaten by the Bushmen. In this region, too, the grass was very luxuriant, and would have provided food for thousands of cattle, without deprivation to the huge flocks of gemsbok that wandered over it. Many of these wide “desert” stretches were extremely beautiful, being covered for miles with tall, thickly growing flowers, a species of campanula something like a fox-glove, growing to a height of three or four feet, and of beautiful and vivid colours of great variety. The scent of these vast parterres was faintly sweet in the daytime, but during the night it became almost overpowering, and I was told by Old Gert that Bushmen have a great objection to sleeping among them, believing that to do so means never to wake.
During the whole of our trip, so far, since we had left the border and entered the Reserve, we had seen no human being, nor even a spoor, but on the edge of one of these eastern pans we now discovered the remains of a recent Bushman camp, the small shelters of interwoven branches being simply constructed to afford a little shade during the hottest part of the day. They had apparently been gone only a day or two, trekking eastward, and the remains of full-grown t’samma showed that the fruit was already to be found in that direction. The little desert Ishmaels had probably seen our fires, and scented the presence of the white man, as I put it to van Reenen. He looked me up and down and said, “Well, yes! the wind’s been blowing from our direction!”
It is quite true that you cannot have many baths out of a quart of water a day, but I think he might have put it differently.
After about a week of this we trekked back to our camp, where we revelled in roster-kook and coffee and sugar, and compared notes with Telfer, who had tested several more pans north, as far as possible, without water. We had expected a Scotch cart with our next load of water, and the idea was to endeavour to get the oxen over as far as Aar Pan with a light load of stores, tools, etc.; but the waggon turned up without the smaller vehicle, and van Reenen and I decided to go back again, with as much as we could carry, and try to locate a big pan known by the Bushman name of “Koichie Ka,” near which was one of the pans where several diamonds had been picked up, whilst Telfer and Du Toit would come on with the cart a week later.
I shall describe this trip somewhat in detail, as it was typical of what happened almost daily afterwards. We carried almost 60 lb., each taking flour, coffee, tools, etc., and made very heavy going of it to Aar Pan, where we made for a wit boom tree we had discovered on the top of one of the big dunes, and worked till late cutting branches, and making a sort of shelter to which we added our waterproof sheets—for this time we came prepared for rain, and we got it. By ten at night it was coming down in sheets, and a terrific thunderstorm burst over us, keeping us busy till daylight trying to keep the water out and the fire in, and being pestered the whole time by van Reenen’s pet aversion, scorpions. This continued well into the following morning, when, as soon as it somewhat lifted, we made a cache of our stores in the tree, and started towards the far-distant pan Koichie Ka. About noon the sun came out, and the whole desert steamed. We passed for hours through nothing but miles of the beautiful flowers I have described, and then came to a patch of broken dunes where the vegetation was scantier, and where we saw more snakes in an hour than I had ever seen before. Presumably the rain had disturbed them, and they were now drying themselves; at any rate, there they were, almost at every step, principally big yellow and brown cobras; but one very striking and, to me, entirely new variety was a very light yellow chap with round spots of a brilliant scarlet speckled over him, exactly like spots of blood. They were in every good-sized bush, in the meer-cat burrows that honeycombed the hollows, coiled round the tufts of toa grass—in fact, they swarmed.
We had hoped to reach the big pan by nightfall, as there was a big krantz there where we could shelter; but it became evident that we could not do so, and we turned aside towards a small pan where a few bushes gave promise of a fire at least, for it became evident that we were in for rain again.
This rain was becoming monotonous, it seemed to follow us about, and the annoying part of it was that it did not relieve our anxiety as to water to any appreciable extent: no matter how it poured, the whole rainfall sank immediately into the sand or, where it was caught in a pan, became undrinkable brine almost immediately.
Moreover it meant that, to rest at all, we had to encroach on the precious hours of daylight, to say nothing of lying on the damp sand. And after another miserable and rainy night, I found to my consternation that I was in for a bout of fever, here, a day’s march from our few stores at Aar Pan even, and quite two from the camp! We started on again as soon as possible, for I argued that, if I was going to be ill, a krantz such as we expected to find at Koichie Ka would be a better place to lie up in than the dunes—more home-like, as it were. Van Reenen was all right, but unfortunately one of his shoes went wrong through being soaked, and soon the sole began to part company with the upper. And he had left his voorslaag at Aar Pan. Luckily I had some fancy native wire-work in my belt which, unravelled, served to keep sole and upper together, but neither of us was doing Marathon time that day. We found the pan about midday: one of the largest, almost a perfect circle, and with the krantz as Old Gert had described it. This rocky krantz we found to consist of deep red and yellow sandstone, apparently belonging to the Zwartmodder series. It flanked the northern edge of the pan, rising abruptly some 60 feet, and was capped with concretionary limestone, which also covered the dunes behind it. It was honeycombed with caves, and there was evidence that it had swarmed with baboons, whose absence was probably accounted for by the fact that a pair of big leopards and their cubs were its present occupants. Their spoors showed that they were “at home,” and later we lighted a big fire and tried to smoke them out, besides firing a few shots into their cave; but luckily they did not respond to the invitation.