Returning to Cape Town, he began, but with less enthusiasm than on the former occasion, his preparations for a second journey into the interior. Experience, he imagined, had enabled him to improve upon his former plans. He had seen the country, he had studied its inhabitants. Had he not laid the foundation for almost certain success? The result showed how dim, how bounded, how little to be depended upon is human foresight.
His followers were now more numerous than formerly: eighteen men, one woman, three horses, thirteen dogs, three milch cows, eleven goats, and fifty-two oxen. With this train he departed from Saldanha Bay, June 15th, 1782, directing his course towards the north, along the western coast of Africa. During the early part of the journey, in the district of the Twenty-four Rivers, he found the prodigious nests of the Termites or white ant, which, though inferior in dimensions to those described by other travellers, were yet four feet in height. These ants, which are accounted a delicacy by the Chensu Karir, a wandering people of the Deccan, are likewise eaten by the Hottentots, who seem to regard them with a more favourable eye even than locusts, which are, however, highly esteemed.
Notwithstanding that, in pursuance of the advice of his Cape friends, he had set out in the rainy season, the party had not advanced far before the want of water was experienced. The men and oxen suffered extremely, but the dogs were still more severely afflicted, and several of them, after exhibiting symptoms of their approach to a state bordering upon hydrophobia, ran off into the desert, where they perished, or relapsed into their original wildness. The party was in this position when Le Vaillant, whose mind was tortured by the most gloomy forebodings, was startled from his reveries by the sharp cry of a bird which was passing over his head. It was a mountain duck, which, he doubted not, was proceeding towards a spring. He therefore put his horse to the gallop, and earnestly pursuing the flight of the bird with his eye, had very quickly the satisfaction of observing it alight upon a great rock, where it disappeared. Persuaded that it had stopped to drink, he clambered up the rock, and found in fact a large basin, or hollow in the rock, filled with water, in which the duck was gayly swimming about and amusing itself. He had not the ingratitude to fire at it, but he frightened it away, in the hope that, not having sufficiently quenched its thirst, it might fly to another cistern within sight; but in this he was disappointed. They now laid up a provision of water for several days, and having allowed all the cattle to quench their thirst, proceeded on their journey. During those excessive droughts, it was curious, when a shower came on, to behold the contrivance of the animals: observing that whatever water fell upon the sands was immediately absorbed and lost, while the quantity with which their own bodies were drenched ran down in little tread-like streams over their sides, they drew near to each other, and by applying their mouths to those diminutive currents, thus succeeded in quenching their excruciating thirst. I am surprised that, in the tremendous extremities to which our traveller and his followers were reduced by want of water, they never had recourse to a method which, disgusting and terrible as it may seem, has, I believe, been successfully tried for quenching thirst by other travellers, as well as by certain tribes of savages; I mean, to drink the blood of the animals they slaughtered. Man has no doubt a natural repugnance to such expedients, but may yield, under the pressure of imperious necessity, to whatever means, short of injustice, Providence may afford him of preserving life.
Upon arriving, after extraordinary privations and fatigue, upon the banks of the Elephant’s River, they indeed found water in abundance; but there was no pasture for the cattle, not even under the shade of the mimosas and willows which bordered the stream. All was burnt up. They proceeded farther inland, therefore, in search of verdure, and arrived on the banks of the Koïgnas, where they encamped upon a spot called the “Bat’s Rock.” From the fresh footmarks of the lion in the sand, they knew that there were enemies in the neighbourhood, and accordingly were more than ordinarily cautious in keeping watch, and in the kindling of their night-fires. But,—
Incidit in Scyllam qui vult evitare Charybdin:
for no sooner had the fires begun to blaze, than there issued forth from the hollows of the rocks myriads of bats, which, flittering hither and thither, struck against their faces, and stunned them with their obscene cries, until, no longer able to endure their clamour, they struck their tents and decamped. Virgil probably derived the idea of his famous description of the Harpies from some such adventure as this; for he had travelled a good deal in the Grecian islands, where bats, I believe, are numerous:
At subitæ horrifico lapsu de montibus adsunt
Harpyiæ, et magnis quatiunt clangoribus alas,
Diripiuntque dapes, contactuque omnia fœdant
Immundo: tum vox tetrum dira inter odorem.