Lodges in the Wilderness

by W. C. Scully

The term “springbuck” is not a satisfying one for this ethereal creature—this most lovely and graceful of the animals whose home is in the desert. The name is too obvious; why not call it what it really is, a “gazelle?” But the early Dutch inhabitants of South Africa not alone lacked imagination, but shewed positive ineptitude in the names they bestowed on the various wild animals. Take for instance the term “gemsbok,” as applied to the oryx; what could be more inappropriate? “Gemsbok” means “Chamois”—and we have in South Africa an antelope which is a chamois to all intents and purposes, but which is called a “klipspringer.” Again,—the tall, heavy, sober-tinted desert bustard is called the “paauw,” a word which means “peacock.” However, these names are so firmly fixed in the South African vocabulary that any endeavour to change them would be a hopeless task.

We trekked south-east from Silverfontein in the spring-wagon, behind a team of eight spanking horses. We slept at Kamiebies, which is an uncertain water-place a few miles over the edge of the desert and a short day’s journey south of Gamoep. During the day we rested; in the night we had to make a dash of some forty miles for our objective. We meant to take the poachers by surprise,—to drop on them just at daybreak, as though from the clouds. So in the mean time I lazed through the long, delicious day.

The rains had not alone been earlier and heavier than usual, but they had fallen throughout an unusually extensive area. The mountain tract was ablaze with flowers; even Bushmanland stirred in its aeon-old sleep, for the skirts of the last rain-cloud had trailed well over its borders, and the latent life of the waste had leaped, responsive, to the surface. Now a whole flora that had slept for years in tubers and dry stalks sent forth blossoms in million-fold rivalry to attract the replete, drowsy insects.

Here, from a dense, thorny, involuted mass of gnarled, shapeless stems that must have been many centuries old, arose the delicate, fairy-like petals of a scented pelargonium. The corolla was snow-white, except for a minute, sagittate marking of bright cerise on the lower lip. If you had examined ten thousand of these flowers you would not have found one in which that little mark varied to the extent of the ten-thousandth part of an inch. The thought of which that blossom was the manifestation—the afterthought of which the tiny cerise arrowhead was the expression—dwelt down in the unlovely labyrinth of the monstrous stems, and had been adhered to with steady persistence through successions of long arid-year periods. It was whispered to the silk-winged seed from which that hoary patriarch had birth,—perhaps when Alaric was thundering at the gates of Rome. And it would be as unerringly transmitted to blossoms making sweet the breeze in days when men will hold this generation to be as remote as we hold the dwellers of the Solutrè Cavern.

There swayed a slender heliophila—the modest sunlover who, in the course of age-long, patient vigils, had drawn down and ensnared the hue of the desert sky in her petals. Far and near the plain was starred with beauty. The small, inornate, thirst-land butterflies had ventured out from the hills; they flitted to and fro, lazy and listless. They sported with Amaryllis in the sunshine and then tried to flirt shamelessly with Iris, the shy maiden on the nodding, hair-like stem—who veiled her visage in sober brown by day, but revealed it, white and eager to the stars whilst she made the wings of the night-wind faint with perfume.

An oval shrub attracted one’s attention—not through its beauty, but because it was an object startling and bizarre. It looked as though covered with rags of various tints. This was that criminal among vegetables—the Roridula. A close inspection almost filled one with horror; the plant was like a shambles. The leaves resembled toothed traps; in most of them insects were tightly gripped. After these had been sucked dry,—drained of blood and of every vestige of bodily juices, the leaves opened, dropped the mangled and dessicated frames to the ground and cynically opened their fell jaws for more victims. Undeterred by the litter of corpses that cumbered the surrounding ground, other insects crowded in to taste of the viscid juice which the leaves exuded. This was the bait tempting to their doom moths, butterflies, beetles and other minor fauna. Here was Capitalism playing on the greed and credulity of the crowd,—gorging on the life-blood of its hapless dupes,—flourishing and waxing strong amid the ruin of its countless victims.

My eye was caught by a quivering twig; on it was a chameleon. The reptile was nearly nine inches long. His colour was brown, of a shade exactly the same as that of the twig. He moved forward with slow, hesitating steps; he paced like an amateur on the tight-rope, as though afraid of falling. His swivel eye-cases, each with a tiny, diamond-bright speck in the centre, moved about independently of each other. One was focussed on a little green insect waving its antennae on a leaf six inches in front of him; the other was carefully trained backwards over his left shoulder at me. Flick—and his tongue shot out and in so rapidly that the eye could hardly follow its motion. But the insect was no longer on the leaf, and the chameleon was munching something with solemn enjoyment. When night fell he would climb to the top of a strong, dry twig, roll and tuck himself into the shape of a pear, with his head in the centre of the bulge. Then he would change his hue to white and open his mouth, which was bright orange internally. The night-flying lepidoptera would take him for a white, yellow-centred flower, and pop in, seeking nectar. But they would not pop out again.

And the greatest wonder of all,—I bent down to examine a gazania; its inch-long golden rays expanded like a wheel of perfect symmetry. Just where the ray bent over the edge of the green, fleshy cup in which the myriad florets were nested, was a small, dark spot. I brought a simple magnifying glass to bear on this,—and what did I see? A labyrinthine crater of many-coloured fire opened. Curve melted and mingled into reluctant curve, zone into rainbow zone, until the plummet of vision was lost in the radiant abyss. I lifted the flower gently; its texture was thinner than the thinnest paper; beneath it was the desert sand. It had hardly any material thickness, yet infinity lay in its depths. I sought for a gazania of another species and found its petals eyed like the peacock’s tail. Yet another,—it shewed the rose-ardours of dawn contending with the purple of a sea on whose surface night still brooded. Every species had its own colour-scheme—its maze of splendour more intricate than the labyrinth of King Minos.

Old Mr Von Schlicht of Klipfontein—who had spent most of his life in Namaqualand, had recently been endeavouring to recall for me details of the desert journeys of Ecklon and Drege, who did so much for South African botany. I ascertained that Ecklon visited Kamiebies. How his heart must have leaped when his eyes first gathered in the winter glory of those mountains. When he afterwards stood, begging his bread at the corner of the Heerengracht, Cape Town,—did he ever recall that scene? Strange world of men that so often lets its noblest, after lives of heroic toil for the highest and most unselfish ends, die in the gutter—if it does not more mercifully slay them—and pays tribute of corn, wine and oil, of jewels and fine raiment, to the company-monger or other chartered robber adroit enough to squeeze through the meshes of the law.

We inspanned at sunset, and plunged straight into the desert, travelling slightly to the south of east. Our objective was lower Pof Adder—which must not be confounded with the northern Pof Adder beyond Namies. We were out of the region of “toa”; the plain was covered with small shrub,—half of which were soft and succulent and the others hard and thorny. There were no intermediate kinds; the desert is a region of extremes.