Du Toit thought otherwise. “If it could crawl at all it would go to the water—and if it died in it, the water will be giftig (poisonous).”
I stuck to the opinion that the snake would have died in its hole—the wish being father to the thought—for I was half dead with thirst. But it needed no canful of water to show that I was wrong, for the stench that rose from that pit was too awful for words, and I could not face it long enough even to peer down. But Gert told me that the bloated body of the big snake lay almost wholly in the water, of which, by a strange irony of fate, there was quite a large pool in the pit, enough, had it been drinkable, to have satisfied not only ourselves, but the oxen. So that the puff-adder had a grim revenge for van Reenen’s bullet. There was no water whatever in the other pit, and there was nothing to do but to struggle through to the waggon, which we did by abandoning the cart and with the loss of two of the oxen en route.
We found t’samma there almost exhausted, and a day or two afterwards were forced to retreat again to the Molopo.
Here, after revelling a day or two in good water, we separated, van Reenen and Telfer to enter the Reserve still farther south, whilst I made an attempt to reach the far north-eastern pan known as “Wolverdanse,” where emeralds were supposed to exist, and which Telfer had searched for in vain. From the heights of a pan known as “Kei Koorabie,” which we had reached on our last trip, John the Bastard had pointed out this “emerald pan” on the far horizon to the north, a long blue ridge of a very distinctive shape; but we had realised that the only way to reach it was by striking south from the Kuruman River.
TEACHING CAMELS TO EAT T’SAMMA.
BUSHMAN AT BOOMPLAATS, SOUTHERN KALAHARI.
With native musical instrument.
I had therefore arranged with a camel police trooper, when on his next patrol in that direction, to give me a lift as far as Tilrey Pan, which is the extreme eastern limit of the patrol, and which is very rarely visited even by them.