Lodges in the Wilderness

by W. C. Scully

Although the heat was so intense, we were not badly distressed by it. The thrill of the unaccustomed exhilarated us; each breath we drew was as a draught of new wine. Interesting and unusual incidents befel. Ever and anon a troop of ostriches sped over the plains, their white plumes outstretched and thrilling. On the right, arising from the hollow of an undulation upwards of a mile away, could be seen a small thicket of “black sticks.” Irregularly grouped and standing at various angles they shewed clear and distinct through the miraculously transparent air. “Gemsbokke,” said Andries, laconically. The bodies of the oryx were out of sight; nothing was visible but their long and almost straight horns. Soon the earth-tremor betrayed us, and the thicket of “black sticks” became agitated. It broke up, scattered and reformed in smaller thickets. Then a herd of about fifty oryx swung at a gallop out of the hollow and sped up the wind, leaving a long trail of dust to mark its course.

Night fell again; again the star-curtain descended. At about ten o’clock we once more outspanned. There was not a breath of wind. The desert was vocal with unfamiliar sounds. The weird cries of the jackal were borne from afar across the plains; the clucking lizards put out their heads and conversed from burrow to burrow; the plaintive notes of the night-flying grouse fell from the sky like a rain of echoes. Under the protecting wing of darkness the solitude became populous and vocal with strange tongues.

We inspanned after an hour’s rest. The longest and most wearying effort of our pilgrimage had now to be undertaken; our journey’s end had to be reached before the yokes again were loosened. The night seemed endless; we were spent from the long travail. The yearning for sleep became acutely painful. We swayed and staggered as we followed the creaking wagon.

Dawn broke at length, but we were too weary, too undone to enjoy its loveliness. As the light grew we became aware of an abrupt eminence of granite on our left front; it arose, in the form of a steep cone, from a monstrous, agglomerated mass of copper-tinted, shapeless hummocks. This was Bantom Berg,—the “Belted Mountain,”—its red-cinctured bulk bathed in the first sunbeams, its feet entangled in the illimitable coils of the dune-tract. The latter at once seized and held the attention.

When day had fully dissipated the faint haze of morning we endeavoured to appraise the contours of this gross, amorphous entity,—for the concept that it was one and indivisible had gradually but irresistibly formed. It grew more and more enormous; more gross and inimical. Irregular and convoluted ridges arose from it here and there; it appeared to be absolutely bare of vegetation. In the centre was piled a humped, bulging mass; out of this Bantom Berg lifted its clean-cut cone of granite,—a soaring sphynx still waiting for the carver’s chisel. Here and there columns of dust—slender beneath but widely dilating above at an enormous height, stalked slowly over the body of the prone monster, marking each the path of a miniature whirlwind. As we drew near, the face of the dune-tract once more became indefinite and complicated; for a time the eye could not follow nor appraise its details. But suddenly the thing explained itself; from the central mass, the prostrate carcase of the obscene creature, a number of league-long tentacles, consisting of sand-dunes, extended. These were thick at the base, but they tapered away to nothingness. Like a crouching spider or a half-huddled cuttle-fish the monstrosity sprawled,—its talon-tentacles seeming to gather in the plains—to infest them like a malignant cancer.

The character of the country we were traversing had changed; again the ground was hard beneath our feet; angular fragments of limestone were strewn over its surface. It was as though the dune-devil had collected and assimilated the surface sand so that its loathly limbs might develop. Inexpressibly sinister was this creature,—this mysterious, insatiable intruder from the desolate northern wastes. It seemed to be endowed with some low-graded form of rudimentary life; otherwise it was hard to account for the definite and arbitrary variations in the scheme of its southward advance. For the tentacles did not all extend in the same direction; occasionally one curved in its course and developed against the prevailing wind. The dune-monster was the slow-pacing steed of the Thirst King; it was his throne, his host and his strong city; it was the abhorrent body of which he was the resistless and implacable soul!

Our camping-place lay within the curve of one of the tentacles; it was expedient from the stand-point of the hunter to have the mounded sand between us and the plains—thus affording concealment. The sun was high when the yokes dropped once more. The unhappy oxen, now very thirsty, wandered about emitting low moans of distress. Their fundamental instincts told them that no water was near; their inherited faith in the wisdom and power of man had, however, given them the thought that relief might be provided. Suddenly, however, primordial instinct gained ascendency; their minds were made up. They paced, lowing, to the trail; then advanced along it at a trot. Soon the trot altered to a wild gallop. To-morrow, before noon, they would charge down on Gamoep—and woe to man or beast obstructing their course. Red-eyed, and with blackened tongues extended from roaring, tortured throats, they would fling themselves into the pool and drink their fill. At Gamoep they would remain for four restful days; then they would be brought back to our camp by Piet Noona and his nephew.

So at length we were within the dominions of the Thirst King—our gauntlet thrown down at the gates of his wrath; we were almost within the grasp of his awful hand. The last link with the world inhabited by men snapped when the hapless oxen disappeared over the rim of the desert. Like a water-logged ship in a tideless sea—like a derelict among the Sargossa weeds,—the wagon stood in the solitude and silence, with the cloudless sky above and the sun-scorched earth beneath—with the dune-fiend watching us from his lair. It was almost an insult to the landscape—this wood-and-canvas construction of man, hauled jolting and groaning across the pathless desert by tamed and tortured beasts. It was a disfigurement on the face of Solitude,—an incorporate insult flung like a guage against the ramparts of one of Nature’s most jealously guarded fortresses.

Under the shadow of the wagon-sail we slept throughout the day; the sun was down before we awoke. Once more night put on the garment of life. It was a desert-dweller who wrote that the heavens declared the glory of God; the first astrologer must have had his home in the wilderness. Over the desert the stars, unfolding a glory not revealed elsewhere, descend like a swarm of bees and seem to busy themselves with destiny.

Whispers of ghostly voices close at hand,—faint and far-off cries,—flutters of spectral wings—pulsed through the darkness. In the desert, the brighter the firmament at night, the more intensely darkness seems to brood over the earth,—the more insistent becomes the idea that one is surrounded by living beings, unhuman and unimaginable.