“Good, I’ll make a plan. But when are we to start?”
“Let’s see—this is Tuesday; supposing we get away on Friday. Say Friday morning at daylight.”
“It’ll be no use starting so early; we cannot get to my camp, round by Puffadder, in a day. It will be time enough to start after breakfast.”
“But why do you want to go all that way round? Can’t we go through the dunes?”
“No! you won’t catch me going through the dunes this weather with mules. I have four horses that could do it; I wouldn’t take them there now for five pounds.”
“All right, Koos; we’ll go round by Puffadder and start after breakfast on Friday.”
The vast group of sand-dunes beyond which Koos Bester lived lies like a red-hot spider across the north-eastern section of the Desert, with the legs extending principally towards the south and south-west.
Rather, perhaps, is it like a menacing hand stretched forth by the giant Kalihari—that waterless waste of loose sand which extends northward indefinitely from just across the Orange River—to seize the southern extremity of the African Continent in a fiery grip. The river gorge cut the hand off at the wrist, else the eternal dribble might, in course of time, have overwhelmed all the western districts of the Cape Colony.
The dunes are, as a rule, only from ten to twenty feet in height, except in the central area where they are piled high about an abrupt, strange-looking hill which has a stratum of red stone encircling it like a belt. This hill is called “Bantom Berg,” which means “belted mountain.” The many mile-long fingers straggle over the Desert, gradually encroaching.
No one ever enters the dunes twice, except in case of the most urgent necessity. At every step the traveller sinks to below the ankles in the fine, light, scorching sand. It is sometimes practicable to cross the dune-tract in a light vehicle, if the weather happens to be cool and one’s horses are in good condition. But crossing them is, however, never safe, for there is no water to be had within their repulsive bounds. The bones of many a lost wanderer lie there, covered by the sand streaming over the flat dune-top, under the lea of which he may have crept in the vain hope of getting shelter from the flame-hot wind from the north. In such a case the body would be buried deep, beyond the reach even of the jackals, in a very short time. If ever uncovered it would be found converted into a black, shrunken mummy, for the intense dryness of the sand is such that a body buried in it never decomposes; the moisture is rapidly drained out of it until nothing is left but a parchment bag of bones.