A disappointment it proved, as with most other matters of too sanguine expectation. For a few miles farther the current carried them smoothly as on the day before, and they made good way. But then things began to change, the stream becoming wider with a slower flow. This, they could see, was constantly decreasing, and at length ended in complete stagnation, as though the water were dammed up below.
Now, for the first time, had they to take to oars and poling, the poles serving best in such shallow water. For they found it to be less than a fathom’s depth, and still getting shallower as they pushed onward. But they had not much farther onward to go, nor could they. Another mile or so and the rafts, all three, became grounded. Just what Jan Van Dorn had been for some time apprehending—the river was run out!
Chapter Nineteen.
A Congregation of Crocodiles.
Yes; the river had run out, or, to speak more correctly, run in, underground. Its channel was there extending on ahead of them, a belt of silver-white sand, hollow in the centre, and with a bordering of brown, withered reeds. But no water in it; not a drop, nor the sign of such, far as they could see, though commanding a view of it to more than a mile’s distance. For they were looking down an Omaramba, a river’s bed, in which water flows only in the season of inundation, at other times sinking into the earth, to filter away underneath. To the Vee-Boers the thing was neither strange nor new. In their migrations they had met the like before, and ofttimes; for a stream periodically dried up is no rare phenomenon in Southern Africa, nor indeed in other parts of the world. The same occurs in Asia, notably in Australia, as also in both divisions of the American continent. Nor is it unknown in the eastern countries of Europe, by the Black and Caspian Seas.
To our voyagers, then, it was less a surprise than vexation—indeed, bitter disappointment. All the time spent in the construction of the rafts, all their labour lost, to say nought of the helpless, hopeless situation they were now placed in!
But was it so helpless or hopeless? That remained to be seen; fortunately so, else they might have despaired indeed. They did not yet, nor could they, till the question had answer—
“How far does the dried-up channel extend?”