Occasionally a flock of wild ostriches would speed across the path with enormous strides, covering the ground at an incredible speed; occasionally a tiny steenbok fell to the rifle, and once or twice a few gemsbok would be seen for a moment floundering over the crest of a distant dune, or, with heads thrown back and long sabre-like horns sloped in splendid attitude, would stand and gaze at us for a moment before bounding away. Big blue hawks with bright red beaks were plentiful, and I much regretted having one day shot one, for I found its crop full of snakes and lizards, and farmers have told me that this same blaauw valk does infinitely more good in this respect than the much-belauded secretary-bird.
We saw but few snakes, an occasional geel capel (yellow cobra) or a lazy and bloated puff-adder failing to get out of our way before we saw him, but scorpions were an absolute pest. They came along with their tails cocked up, rampant and vicious, and pining for something to sting, walking straight at the camp fire of an evening, and stinging at the embers till they sizzled on them, when the cheerful smell that arose would bring others by the dozen. At least, the natives firmly believe this, and certainly our experience confirmed it. In gathering firewood or dry leaves one had to be especially careful of these little pests, and it was no uncommon thing to find three or four nestling between our blankets and the sand in the morning. Often we amused ourselves by catching them and putting two together in a sieve on the ground, when after a little teasing they would fight furiously till both were stung to death.
We passed the tiny police post at Abiqwas Pits, where two forlorn camel police are marooned in a desert of sand-dunes and have to guard (?) a district as big as an English county and watch about forty miles of the German frontier. The police force of this long border of ours is grotesquely inadequate and will be referred to later.
Thence we toiled through extremely heavy dunes, alternating with broad, flat stretches of hard shale, thickly strewn with stones that made our progress both difficult and painful. These stony spaces are known locally as aars, a name given to any feature on the surface which is long compared to its breadth, and the variety of water-worn stones with which they were strewn was astonishing. Fragments of igneous rock predominated, and conspicuous amongst them were many rounded fragments of a peculiar amygdaloid similar to that found near Pniel on the Vaal River, but by no means identical, the tiny steam-holes being filled with nodules of agate, chalcedony, and other forms of silica, or occasionally with a bright green mineral that I could not classify.
Prominent also were numerous lumps of bright scarlet jasper, and the banded ironstone, usually associated with the diamond in the gravels of the River Diggings, was also here in abundance.
This débris, however, though it is found spread over hundreds of miles of country, is usually a very superficial layer thinly strewn over the shale. Where it came from is difficult to imagine, as few of the rocks of which it is composed are to be found locally; but evidence seems to point to its having been brought there by huge floods in the remote past, and at a period prior to the advent of the enormous accumulation of sand that now forms the dunes of the desert and covers up the bulk of the “country rock” of this wide, waterless region.
In the midst of these huge dunes, we one evening met a waggon belonging to a Boer who had for some time past been farming in German territory over the border, and as it was near outspan time we camped that night together. He had twenty-four sturdy oxen yoked to his buck-waggon, on which were piled his few household belongings and his numerous family. He had been one of the many “irreconcilables” who, having fought to the last in the Boer War, had refused to live under British rule, and had trekked to German West and there taken up land and settled down. And now, after years of galling and irksome submission to the German régime of red tape and officialism, he had been exasperated beyond all endurance by some sample of German “justice,” and was trekking back, extremely thankful to be once more under the once despised and hated Union Jack, and full of the wrongs experienced at the hands of the Duitsers.
I met a number of these sadder and wiser men at various times along the border, and almost invariably their experiences of German rule had had a most salutary effect upon them, from a British point of view.
Eventually we emerged from these giant dunes on to a fairly wide, level plain known as Saulstraat, and here by the water-pits found six fine shady thorn-trees that had been planted in a line by some thoughtful old pioneer of the desert; and as we had not seen anything bigger than a bush for some days past, it was most natural that we should seek their shade for our midday outspan. G. smoothed away a place from the fallen thorns and threw himself down, whilst I—much to his surprise—climbed into the cart and prepared to take my siesta in its very cramped space. “Why don’t you come down here?” asked G. I told him there might be insects. “Insects!” he said, in high disdain, “insects! Well, I always thought you were a crank, but that settles it! Here we’ve been roasting for days till we smell like grilled steak, and when you get the chance of a bit of comfort in the shade of nice trees, you’re afraid of insects! Insects! Why, there aren’t any, and if there were they wouldn’t keep me from this! Insects!”
“Be warned in time,” I said solemnly. “These are no common insects.”