TAKING THE HORSES ACROSS OLIFANTS RIVER.
Of course I simply had to do it—they were too snug and dry and warm, and I was too wet and cold, to allow of any other course of action! So I just snicked the guy-ropes slightly in a weak spot and hurried back and turned in again in my wet blankets, hoping for the best. It came soon—a muffled squelch—followed by a perfect bedlam of polyglot profanity. I heard someone get mixed up with the pots and buckets and make disparaging remarks about them; I heard another’s periods cut short by a sound impossible to write, but that conveyed a pleasant picture of an attempt to get rid of a full mouthful of sand—in fact, though I could see nothing, I could hear enough to conjure up a vivid picture of what was happening under that extremely wet and extremely heavy bucksail.
At length they struggled out, as I could visualise by the storm of recrimination and accusations.
“You donder!” I heard Du Toit snort (I found later his nose was badly bashed by a bucket). “I knew you didn’t tie the verdomte touw properly!”
“Oh, blazes!” retorted Jim’s voice, “here’s a slab-sided son of a zand-trapper, that don’t know a rope from a reim, trying to tell a sailor-man how to tie knots. H——! Why, you snored the blamed thing down! Where’s your partner anyway? Asleep, I s’pose, under all that. Well! what did I say about sleeping-sickness?”
They then appeared to search for me; and then one of the incoherent gentlemen made a remark to Jim.
“So he did,” I heard him agree; “cleared out when we were talking. I’d clean forgotten. He’ll be asleep somewhere. Sleep!”
Then they came and found me, and of course found me asleep, and made fitting remarks.
I relate this little incident at full length because it happened to be the only cheerful happening of that disastrous trip.
Directly the fog lifted and we had re-erected the tent and had some breakfast, we took a sieve and a spade or two and started towards the beach, leaving one of the crew to watch tent and cutter. It was probably nearer four miles south than three—a long, wearisome drag through heavy sand for the most part, for the tide was high and we could not follow the water’s edge.