My eyes have gazed their last upon the face of the desert. Although I love her still,—although the memory of her burning ardour, her splendid indifference and her wealth of illusive charm is my abiding and most valued possession, we shall meet no more. She is not a mistress to be lightly courted. As Brunhild slew Siegfried so would the Desert inevitably slay one who remained her lover after desire had outlasted strength. Her lioness-like caresses are not for those whose blood slows down as it nears the ocean of eternal silence—even as the force and fury of the Gariep sink to tranquillity when the mighty stream nears the Atlantic—and extinction.
Good-bye, Andries,—best of comrades. I have not told of all our adventures—of how we pursued the springbuck at full gallop across the trackless plains in your springless, home-made rattletrap, behind four wild, half-trained horses,—until we were black and blue. I have not told of how we were lured by men who desired our death to a spot sixty miles deep in the waste, and of how we had to struggle back again in the burning heat because we found the promised water to be brine, and the edges of the pools containing it thickly caked with salt. I have not told of your consistent unselfishness in giving me the best chances in the matter of shooting, nor of how generously you placed the riches of your desert lore at my disposal.
The world for us is not the same as it was—even a few years ago, for at our time of life a very few years make a considerable difference where physical endurance is concerned. Although on the verge of middle life we could still, in the days I have told of, gallop ten miles at a stretch and hold a rifle straight at the end of the race—we could endure thirst, hunger and fatigue without wilting.
In the matter of shooting I am, perhaps, like the reformed rake who coined virtue out of inability further to sin. Nevertheless, I could no longer take pleasure in slaughtering the few of Nature’s lovely wild creatures that survive our cruelly scientific machines of precision. It is true my eyesight is not quite what it was. To what extent this circumstance should be reckoned as a factor towards my abstention, I will not attempt to say.
We shall soon be old, you and I; in fact it is almost stretching a point to call ourselves still only middle-aged. We are just a couple of ineffective veterans who can only draw comfort from the bank of our experiences. Aber “wir haben geloebt und geliebet.”
Good-bye, Hendrick. No more will your keen and faithful eyes hold my vagrant spoor over sand and kanya. No more shall I see your bullet-shaped, pepper-corned head with its oblique eyes and gleaming teeth arising unexpectedly from among the tussocks. For all I know you may have saved me from a dreadful death. I can recall at least one occasion on which I was positively sure you were wrong in your idea as to the direction in which the camp lay,—yet the event proved you to be right. Had I then been alone, my bones might now be lying white in the heart of Bushmanland.
And you, Typhon,—I suppose you have awakened to wrath—that your hunched shoulders have heaved many times since that day on which my awed eyes beheld your russet mane flung streaming southward on the tempest,—I suppose your impotent tentacles still strive to gather up the plains into their blighting grip.
Sometimes, when the firmament is very clear and the fingers of the wind stray gently through the tresses of the night, I lift my eyes to the familiar stars and realise that again the sky has gathered the throbbing desert to its breast and covered Bushmanland with the folds of its purple mantle. It is then I unlock my storehouse of dreams and live once more through vanished days of strenuous effort and nights of wonderful mystery.
The End.