Lodges in the Wilderness

by W. C. Scully

This gift might have been described as an offering on the altar of decency. I was not inclined to prudery, but Piet Noona’s nephew was beginning to grow up, and his sumptuary condition was shocking. In fact his only available garment was a tattered fragment of sheepskin,—a fragment so scanty that it would have barely sufficed to cover the opening of a porcupine’s burrow. Even then it could not have been guaranteed to keep out the draught. The jackal skins were not large, but compared with the sheepskin fragment they would have been as an overcoat to a child’s pinafore. I explained how they were to be worn: one in front and one in the rear. The coverings of the hind paws were to be joined, skin to skin, in such a way that the combined result would hang from the wearer’s shoulders, and the brushes were to be wound about his neck when the weather was chilly. Piet Noona’s nephew would thus be reasonably protected, fore and aft, both from Mrs Grundy and the weather. Crowned with a chaplet of Ghanna leaves and with his knob-kerrie for thyrsus, he might have easily passed for a youthful but disreputable Dionysus.

As we drew out towards the borders of the desert the fingers of silence seemed to press less heavily on our lips. Supper over, we laid ourselves on the soft sand and conversed. But at first our conversation was low-toned and very serious. The imminence of infinity abashed us; it was as though earth and air were full of ears bent to catch every word we uttered. I do not think anyone,—even the most feather-brained, could be garrulous in the desert.

The flames lit up the surrounding faces,—the ruddy, rugged countenance of Andries, with its blue, laughing eyes and cropped beard streaked with grey. The visage of Piet Noona was like that of an old baboon; his nephew’s resembled that of a young monkey. Danster’s physiognomy indicated a mixture of various strains; the result was quite insignificant.

The Mongolian features of Hendrick were distinctive and very interesting. What was it that his appearance suggested; not exactly the Chinaman, for his expression was not at all impassive; one could always read his mood by it. His eyes were slightly oblique, his cheekbones high, his head was as round as a Kanya stone. With remarkable muscular development of the chest and shoulders, heavily hipped and very slightly bandy-legged,—for long I was puzzled to discover what is was that Hendrick reminded me of. He loved a horse and rode like a Centaur—or the man-part thereof. Then I knew: it was a Hun that I was seeking for,—one of the locusts of that Asiatic horde which swept over Europe from the north-eastern steppes. I think that Attila, the Eraser of Nations, who swayed the world from his saddle-throne, must have looked somewhat like my scout. The most plausible theory as to the origin of the Hottentot race is that its progenitors migrated hither from Asia. Even van Riebeek noticed the resemblance between the aborigines of the Cape and the Chinese. Yes, I was almost certain that Hendrick was a Hun,—or rather that the tribe he was mainly descended from and the Huns were twigs from the same bough of the great human tree.

Hendrick, to be appreciated, should have been seen on the back of an unrestrained or a vicious horse; it was then that he became a personality. He rode as gracefully bare-back as with a saddle. I could picture him galloping away from some sacked and smoking town—not on raw-boned Bucephalus, but on some thickset, shaggy, steppe-bred mount. Hanging limply across his tense, gripping thighs was a milk-white, gently-nurtured Ildico maiden. Her wide blue eyes were stony with horror,—her golden hair dabbled in the sweat of the horse’s heaving flank. She was bound and pinioned with shreds torn from her robe of lawn. The other Huns were loaded with sacks of church plate, with weapons and with merchandise. But Hendrick looked on the face of this maiden, the daughter of what, but a few short hours before, had been a proud and noble house,—and desired her alone. But I think and hope she died of terror before the bivouac was reached. Hendrick was a tame, kindly, obedient hunting-scout, but I am sure that the fierce, conquering Hun lay sleeping within him.

There is not a watering place in the Bushmanland desert which has not some tragic story connected with it,—some reminiscence of a lonely thirst-death, some tale having for its motif the shedding of blood—usually by treachery. But death, accidental or designed, was always the theme. Not many miles from where we were camped that night one of the earlier Wesleyan missionaries travelling from Warmbad to the half-breed settlement on the Kamiesbergen had been shot to death with poisoned arrows. This happened early in the nineteenth century. The murderer was executed some time afterwards at Silverfontein.

The first white man who crossed this tract did a venturesome thing. For although at that time the Bushmen had already been considerably thinned out by the Hottentots and half-breeds, many of them still lurked in the less accessible parts. From time to time they emerged, singly or in small parties, and wreaked a wild and often quite inconsequent revenge.

Their mode of attacking travellers was to steal up at night among the tussocks and discharge a flight of poisoned arrows at point-blank range, among those surrounding the camp fire. They would then immediately decamp and scatter in the darkness. Hours afterwards they might repeat the attack. If the travellers were deep in the desert the repetition would perhaps be delayed until the following night, for the Bushmen took no avoidable risks. Usually the oxen or horses forming the span would also be slain. One can imagine the plight of a party of travellers under such circumstances: half of them dead or dying in agony, the survivors cowering in a wagon as hopelessly tethered to a lonely spot in a trackless waste as a wrecked ship is chained to the reef that gores her side. They would have been ringed round with drought and famine; close prisoners in a solitude only mitigated by the unseen presence of implacable foes, the stroke of whose dart was as silent and deadly as that of the snake.

Yet these Bushmen had sufficient justification for all the terrible reprisals they perpetrated. They were the original dwellers of the soil; the Hottentots came, dispossessed them of their best water-places and slaughtered them without mercy. When they migrated eastward they met the Kaffirs, who proved a more formidable and quite as pitiless a foe. In the storming of the Bushmen’s strongholds their women and children were speared or flung into the flames. They retired to the most remote wastes,—to the sheer, black-chasmed fastnesses of the Malutis, where snow lies thick for months at a time,—to torrid, waterless deserts. But in every retreat, no matter how remote, their foes sought them out. They invariably made a desperate resistance, and sold their lives dearly.

But the duel was between ferocity organised and ferocity deranged, so the former was bound to prevail. It was a struggle of the clan against a number of units which had no permanent cohesion; whose combinations were fitful and occasional. There is no god but strength visible on the checker-board of history. When the mighty is put down from his seat it is not the humble and meek who is exalted, but one whose strength, being of a more subtle order, is perhaps not at first recognised as such—one whose cloak of humility may cover armour of proved temper. The strength of the Bushmen, perfected through long ages of experience, was all-potent against his one-time only adversary, the animal. But when used against man, the intruder who had fought for his existence with other men and learnt in the process the utility of combination, it failed. The Bushman contended under one tremendous disability: he had no tribal organisation,—the family was the independent unit.