The old man’s gnarled and wrinkled body was covered with scars, and he had a tale to tell of each. The raised tattoo marks upon his chest were tribal marks, given to him with weird ceremonies when he was admitted to the “blood brotherhood,” whilst directly over his heart was a circle of little cuts, showing where he had been inoculated with snake-venom and made immune from their bite. He described this as a fearful ordeal, under which men often died, but which, when they survived, “made them snakes themselves,” as he expressed it. Neither puff-adder, ringhals, cobra, or night-adder would attempt to bite a man thus transformed; and he claimed that, if he came near a snake, it would remain rigid, and allow him to handle it with impunity. Certainly he showed not the slightest fear of them, though I noticed he invariably carried the Hottentot antidote for snake-bite about with him. This antidote is a small low bush with yellow flowers, found in the Kalahari—but nowhere very plentiful—the parts used being the dried roots and small twigs. The inoculation is carried out with the venom of the cobra, which is captured alive, and forced to bite the patient or novitiate over the region of the heart. Meanwhile he is held by two men, who watch him, and administer the antidote only in small doses, and when the poison seems likely to gain the mastery, they rub the perspiration which pours from him into the bite. In common with every Hottentot and Bushman ever met, Old Gert believed the sand-gecko to be the most deadly of all poisonous reptiles, though scientists assert that it is absolutely harmless!
He showed us a bite on his knee, which he solemnly asserted was made by one of these little lizards many years before, and which had nearly killed him, his whole body swelling, and his jaw being locked for days!
For many years the old pagan had been virtually King of the Kalahari Bushmen, with henchmen and wives galore, hunting the ostrich for its plumes, and the lynx, leopard, lion, and jackal for their valuable pelts, bringing in his commodities twice a year to the white men at Klaas Lucas Kraal, Kheis, or Griquatown, and returning with his waggons full of Manchester goods, sugar, coffee, and tobacco, and above all with dop sufficient for a glorious jamboree.
He told me many gruesome tales of the “Great Thirst” (the Kalahari), where even the Bushman is occasionally unwary enough to stray too far from t’samma and dies hideously of thirst. He had wandered northward to N’Gami, and westward to the wild coast near Portuguese territory, where the Kunene runs into the sea, and long before a German flag was ever hoisted in that north-western part of Damaraland. Once, after many days of trekking and half dead with thirst, he shot and wounded a bull eland, and following it, found water in a pit in a desert pan.
Drinking it, three of his four horses fell dead almost at once. He and his companions got away, but no less than 43 out of the party of 46 Bastards following them were poisoned, the three who escaped being young children.
Dop, Hottentots, Bastards, and white men between them had long since wiped out his tribe of Bushmen, and the old man had settled down at Upington with a new tribe of children and grandchildren; but his heart’s desire was the desert, and he was frantically eager to be back among the dunes. He knew the pan where the other Bushman had picked up the diamonds; he knew also a pan where the garnets and carbon lay thick in a soft yellow matrix, which, by its description, could be nothing but “Kimberlite”; and, more remote than any of them, he knew a similar pan, where there was a big limestone capping, in which were dotted bright green stones innumerable.
I showed Old Gert my collection of stones, and he picked out my one tiny emerald unhesitatingly from among half a dozen others—green gems, peridotes, green garnets, chrysophrase, tourmalines, etc.—and in addition described the precise crystallisation that the emerald takes.
Anderson was credited with having found emeralds in the Kalahari; I myself had picked up beryls—of which they are a variety—in abundance in German territory, west of where we were bound; and to add to the likelihood of there being emeralds as well as diamonds in this “Tom Tiddler’s Ground,” I heard from Mr. H. S. Harger, a well-known Johannesburg gem expert and geologist, who happened to be in Upington at the time, that some years back no less than £40,000 worth of fine rough emeralds had been sold in Hatton Garden—and that it was believed by all the cognoscenti that they came from the Kalahari!
On Saturday, February 17th, all was at length ready. We had discarded every bit of superfluous gear, and our waggons were packed with all that we expected to need during our long trip; our rifles and shot-guns hung from straps, ready to hand for the game we hoped to kill along the path, and we were armed with an additional permit from the Resident Magistrate, authorising us to take these weapons into the Reserve—a permission which had been omitted in the Government permit, and without which the first police trooper we met would have promptly hauled us back in ignominy.