The glamour of prospecting

by Fred C. Cornell

My guide in the Kalahari, and for many years a chief of Bushmen there.

In Upington we were lucky in finding Lieutenant Geary, the officer in charge at Rietfontein, who was down on a holiday, and who very kindly filled in the approximate positions of the above-named pans on my map, upon which the vast Game Reserve was simply a huge blank space, marked “Unexplored.” These pans he had visited himself on camel-back, and he was sceptical of our being able to reach them in any other manner. But camels, we found, were quite unobtainable in Gordonia, the Rietfontein police being the only people who had any, and they, it appeared, being so short that to lend us any was out of the question.

Meanwhile, as we had hopelessly out-distanced our heavy transport, and could not start till its arrival, we arranged a flying trip to the Great Falls, hoping to obtain a successful film of the wonderful cataract; for with an appreciation of the fact that we should be visiting places where not even a photograph had been taken before, we had obtained a cinematograph camera and many thousand feet of film.

Although the volume of water was not so great as on our previous visit, I was more impressed than ever with the solemn and desolate grandeur of the place, and above all with the fact of so much potential energy being absolutely unutilised, and the strange anomaly of a huge body of water, in a land where it is such a scarce and valuable commodity, running absolutely to waste.

The views were obtained with considerable difficulty, for, as I have before described, the Falls are very difficult of access, and to obtain a frontal view of them we had to operate the machine from a tiny ledge of rock overhanging the abyss at a great height, and so small that the third leg of the tripod-stand could find no footing, but hung out over the precipice, whilst the two of us operating hung on by our eyebrows to it and to the trembling rock. I was profoundly thankful when it was all over, and we were back on firm ground again, with what we hoped would prove a very fine and unique film.

This preliminary canter over, and once again in Upington, we settled down to preparations for the northward trek, for our heavy belongings had arrived in our absence, and we were anxious for the road. Both guide and waggon were ready, the latter belonging to a young Dutchman named Gert du Toit, who was familiar with the fringes of the Reserve, and who was himself most anxious to accompany us; for he, too, had heard of, and believed in, the diamond-mine. And to give him his due at once, no better sportsman or companion have I ever roughed it with either in Africa or elsewhere.

Old Gert Louw, my guide, was a most remarkable old chap. Full of veldt lore, and at one time famed as a hunter, his knowledge of the Kalahari was unequalled. For many years of his young manhood he had been the chosen chief of all the Bushmen that wandered there, and knew every “pan” in the whole vast expanse.

He had no idea of his own age, but must have been well over ninety; but he was still alert, keen-eyed, and full of intelligence. But Bushman chief as he had been, old Gert was not a Bushman born. Son of a Boer father and a Hottentot mother, and born in the Kenhardt district, he had, whilst still a youth, wandered with other hunters into the Kalahari in search of ostrich feathers and skins, and there, joining a Bushman tribe, had eventually become their chief—apparently by the simple process of eliminating all his rivals by means of the flint-lock, with which he had been an unerring shot, and against which the poisoned arrows of the little Bush folk had very little chance.

Not that he despised the arrows altogether, but learned to shoot well with them, and had many a tale to tell of the myriad head of game that the little flint-pointed darts had brought down for him. He told me of the poisons the Bushmen used, poisons so virulent that a scratch from an arrow dipped in either of them meant death to man or beast within a few minutes. The huge “baviaan” spider provided one of these. Caught at a certain season, these venomous insects were pounded between stones, and the resultant paste exposed to the light of the moon for several nights before it was fit for the arrow-tips. Another favourite poison was made from the viscid juice of the Candelabra euphorbia, and this also was prepared with certain rites and observances in which the moon again figured. Both these poisons were so rapid in effect that the Bushmen, shooting at game with their arrows thus poisoned, made little effort to do more than pierce the animal’s skin, nor troubled to pursue their quarry, leisurely following the spoor in the certainty that the wounded animal would be found dead at no great distance. Peculiarly enough, these poisons, though so virulent, had no ill effect upon the flesh of the animal slain. These arrow’s were never used for war. For this the favourite poison was obtained from certain portions of a putrefying corpse, and, according to Old Gert, a man wounded with a war-shaft poisoned with this awful venom died horribly of lock-jaw almost immediately.

Even when iron was obtainable, it was rarely used for arrow-heads, the Bushmen preferring those of flint, agate, or bone, as the poisons were not so effective on the iron barbs.