There was no sign of the herds of springbok which are at times found on Richtersfeldt, a few paauw—very wild and quite unapproachable—being the only signs of life; there was nothing to prospect but sand, or an occasional outcrop of white, barren and “hungry”-looking quartz, barely worth turning aside to look at; and I sat on the waggon box and looked at that distant line of blue peaks and wanted those mountains bad! That was before I got to them, mind....
CHAPTER VIII
RICHTERSFELDT—ALEXANDER BAY—MOUTH OF THE ORANGE RIVER—“HADJE AIBEEP”—HELL’S KLOOF—A DESERTED COPPER-MINE—ROUGH GOING—A MAGNIFICENT VISTA OF PEAKS—AN OLD GOLD PROSPECT.
The fourth day found us at Springklip, a solitary hill near the mountain range, where, between two outlying granite peaks, a few waggons, and here and there a mat hut, marked the spot on which the Hottentots were to assemble for their annual nachtmaal (communion).
There was no sign of a permanent settlement; indeed, with the exception of Kuboos, a day’s trek farther on, where there is a tiny stone-built mission church, these nomads have no fixed village, trekking from place to place as water and grazing dictate.
During the whole of our four days’ slow trekking we had not seen a solitary human being, but now the natives could be seen coming in from all directions: parties of two or three men mounted on wiry little ponies, and followed by their women and children on foot; others mounted on powerful-looking riding oxen, saddled with horse-saddles of obviously German make, and significant of the loot brought from the farther side of the Orange River by the many refugees who had followed those doughty Hottentot fighters, Witbooi and Marengo, in the Hottentot rebellion; rickety waggons and weird-looking carts tied together with bits of riem and kept together by a miracle; others driving ponies laden with bloated and repellent-looking water-skins from the nearest water-hole at Doornpoort, some ten miles farther on among the mountains, to which spot our poor oxen had to be driven before they could quench their four days’ thirst. The natives soon came flocking round our waggon. They seemed a dejected, harmless, invertebrate lot of beings, with very little character except an inveterate habit of cadging. Tobacco was their great desideratum, but it was noteworthy that, greedy as they were for it, they invariably shared anything given to them. They were all cleanly-looking, and though their clothing was in many cases a miracle of patchwork, no rags were to be seen.
Mr. Kling, the missionary, arrived that night, and the following morning Ransson and I set out to visit his waggon, about half a mile from our own. Although waggons, carts, and huts had considerably increased in numbers since our arrival, not a soul was to be seen, and the missionary’s waggon was likewise deserted; but from a huge erection of fresh bushes that I took to be a sort of cattle kraal I could hear voices. There appeared to be only two people speaking; first would come a brief emphatic sentence in Dutch, then a reply in clicking Hottentot. To my limited intelligence it sounded as though Mr. Kling was sharply interrogating a native on some point, but, on strolling round the large and high enclosure to look for an entrance, we came suddenly upon line after line of kneeling Hottentots, silently and attentively listening. The “kraal,” in fact, was a temporary chapel hastily built of bushes and filled to overflowing with devout natives, men on one side and women on the other, whilst at the far end, by an extempore altar, stood the missionary and a native in clerical attire, who was rapidly translating Mr. Kling’s address into the vernacular, sentence by sentence, and apparently with force and effect.
I’ll own we tried to bolt, but Mr. Kling called us, and we had perforce to walk up and sit by his side in our shirt-sleeves, facing four or five hundred pairs of curious eyes.
White men are a rarity in the Richtersfeldt, but surely not sufficiently so to account for the intense fixity with which these people regarded me?
Ransson, whom I consider much more of a natural curiosity than I am myself, they appeared to ignore; every pair of eyes seemed to be riveted on me! For a moment I felt flattered, then I tumbled! They had never seen a bald white man before. Ransson told me afterwards that a ray of sunlight, filtering through the bush roof, struck right on the top of my cranium, and was reflected as though from a mirror; he also said they probably thought it was a halo I was wearing. But as he also spread the quite unfounded yarn as to his having found a hen ostrich sitting on my head one morning when we were sleeping in the desert, and evidently taking it for a long-lost egg, I think his statement can be ignored.