Old Schalk always resented any reference to his unserviceable legs, so his wife usually had the last word at these discussions.
The junior members of the Hattingh family consisted of two granddaughters and a grand-niece. The sons and daughters of the camp had married and were scattered over the fringe of the Desert. The three girls were orphans. The two granddaughters were tall, listless-looking girls, with dark hair and eyes, and that transparent and unhealthy complexion which sometimes gives a fugacious beauty and is often found in young women whose diet does not embrace a sufficiency of green vegetable food. Their chests were hollow, their shoulders drooped, and they looked incapable of taking much interest in anything. Their ages were respectively, eighteen and nineteen; their names—Maria and Petronella.
Their cousin, Susannah, was a girl of a different type. She was small of stature, well built, and had a keen and alert look. Her features were strongly marked, her eyes and hair were black, and the redness of her lips was rendered more striking by the pallor of the rest of her face. Her movements were distinguished by an energy which was in striking contrast to the listlessness of the other girls. She suggested a well-favoured squirrel among a family of moles. Her features had a strongly Jewish cast. Although not much admired by the young Boers with whom she came in contact—probably because she did not reach their standard of stoutness—she would have been in other surroundings considered a very pretty girl. There was some mystery in connection with her parentage which gave rise to whisperings among the women. It was, however, certain that she was the daughter of one of Old Schalk’s nieces.
The spot known as Namies is marked by a few stony, irregular kopjes which lie like a small archipelago in the ocean-like waste of the Bushmanland Desert, not far from its northern margin. The highest of these kopjes is less than four hundred feet above the general level of the plains; a circle two miles in circumference would enclose them all. They are formed of piles of granite boulders, between which grow a few hardy shrubs and koekerbooms.
Chapter Three.
Max.
Max Steinmetz stood in the doorway of the little iron shanty at Namies, which was built near the foot of a kopje about three hundred yards from the Hattingh camp. Above his head was a signboard bearing the legend: “Nathan Steinmetz, Allegemene Handelaar.” (General dealer.) He looked out over the wide, wide Desert and watched the smoke-like courses of the violent gusts against which a thunderstorm was labouring from the north-east. The unsavoury odour of half-dried hides assailed his nostrils; the ramshackle iron roof rattled to the blasts over his head. The season was February, and the tortured plains glowed with absorbed heat like Milton’s burning marl.
Over the intermittent moaning and howling of the wind could be heard, at intervals, the mutterings of thunder. The Desert now became a roaring blast-furnace, fanned by the sand-laden gusts which raged fiercer and ever fiercer. Max closed the door and barred it from the inside. A few gouts of rain began to thud on the roof. Then a jagged shaft of lightning shot from the zenith, shattered itself into coruscating splinters against some tempest-packed sheaf of air, and seemed to fill the universe with a blinding blaze. At the same instant the winds were stunned by a crash so awful that the solid earth reeled from the shock. Then came the rain in dense, white, lashing waves, and in a few moments the wide plain became a hissing sea.