Lodges in the Wilderness

by W. C. Scully

One of the dangers of a desert chase lay in the mouse-city, in which on getting entangled an ordinary horse was apt to check so suddenly in his course that he rolled head-over-heels and crushed his rider. But Prince had quite an original method of meeting the difficulty: he spread his legs out in some extraordinary way, sank down until his belly almost touched the ground, and floundered through. The strange thing was that he did not seem to break his stride. There was no jerk; the rider was in no way incommoded. I would have given a great deal for a side view of the performance; it must have resembled somewhat the progress of an heraldic griffin rampaging horizontally instead of vertically.

Where the surface was suitable, neither too hard nor too soft, we cantered slowly along,—careless as the wind that gently agitated the shocks of “toa.” Game was at times in sight, but very far off. Three hartebeest sped away over the sky-line, their forms looming immense and grotesque just as the mirage seized them. I wondered what they looked like when thrown on the sky-screen and seen from a distance of fifty to a hundred miles. Oryx spoor, but not very fresh, abounded.

There were no ostriches visible. Those that on the previous day stampeded eastward had no doubt gone back during the night to the locality in which Hendrick had found them. A few springbuck were occasionally to be seen, but they were exceedingly wild. One would have had to manoeuvre to get within a thousand yards of them. Now and then a paauw flew up,—a forerunner of that immense migration which would take place a few weeks later. Then the whole paauw-population of the Kalihari would cross the Orange River and move over the plains by an oblique route towards the coast. They would return over the same course after they had nested and hatched out their young.

I had brought my rifle,—more from force of habit than anything else, for I was not anxious to shoot. I was content to gaze on the enthralling, impassive face with which the world there defied the arrogant sun; to admire that quality in it which I most lacked,—its steadfastness. I wanted to breathe the desert’s breath, to drink of its life,—to do it homage and to love it—not for any fleeting beauty, but because my unsteadfast soul found it loveable and strong.

I had been on foot for some time. Prince, with the reins fastened short about his neck to prevent them trailing, followed like a faithful dog. Should I pause for what he considered too long an interval, he pushed me gently forward with his nose. He, too, wanted to explore—to wander on listlessly whither the spirit of solitude beckoned.

At length we reached the first strip of Kanya. It was hardly six feet wide,—that even, regular pavement of ironstone spheres laid down by the hand of Nature in furtherance of some aeon-old phase of world-development. Were those spheres forged in some volcano-furnace or turned in the lathe of the rolling waves in days when the temples of Atlantis gleamed white over the ocean that is its tomb and that bears its name? Were they slowly ground in the mill-vortex of some mighty river that bore away the drainage of a boundless humid tract, where now a rain-cloud is almost as rare as a comet?

Straight ahead, a little more than a mile away, the continuous Kanya-veld shewed like a darker wrinkle on the desert’s brown face, for we were now out of the region of “toa.” The stony strips grew wider as I advanced, and the intervening spaces narrower and narrower until they disappeared altogether.

Here Prince and I parted company for a while; I dared not risk the possibility of injury to those faithful feet that had carried me so swiftly and so far. Even proceeding at a walking pace in the Kanya, unless every step were carefully picked, involved a risk of sprain to ankle or fetlock. So I removed the saddle and tied my companion to a bush—not because I feared his straying, but for the reason that it was otherwise impossible to prevent his following me.

It was far hotter there among the Kanya than outside, for the dark-hued stones absorbed heat and radiated it fiercely. The desert’s visage had taken on a sinister, forbidding expression; almost as though it resented intrusion—as though it had surrounded some shrine of secret horror with flame-hot, laming obstacles.

The only vegetation consisted of a few low, gnarled, bitter-looking shrubs. What an apprenticeship to inimical conditions these eremites of the vegetable world must have undergone to enable them to save their scanty leaves alive,—rooted, as they were, in a pinch of brick-like soil lying in narrow spaces between glowing spheres of stone, and lacking rain, as they did, for periods of years at a stretch. Their strength must have been as much greater than that of the oak as the oak’s is greater than that of a willow sapling. Did these shrubs ever flower, I wondered. Perhaps, once in a thousand years, a miracle was wrought on them as it was on Aaron’s rod. Only one could I identify—even so far as the genus went. It was a kind of Rhus; the dark-green, reticulated, trifid leaf—naked and deeply veined above and covered with down beneath,—was quite typical.