In certain countries, where rain seldom falls and the night dews are heavy, a very considerable quantity of water may be obtained from the grass and low bushes before sunrise, by shaking them over some wide shallow vessel; or a piece of waterproof cloth stretched across the prong end of a wide-forked stick. When properly put together an implement of this kind is not unlike a large dustpan. Sponges, or soft porous cloths, absorb a large quantity of water when brought in contact with wet plants or moist surfaces of any kind. They can be squeezed out as fast as they become charged with water.
After a long journey, when the throat is parched, the skin of the lips dried and cracking for want of moisture, the teeth fouled, and the tongue, with all its papillæ, dry and hard as the teeth of a rasp, rattling against them, there is no immediate relief in drinking water.
We have at times halted in a melon patch, and have selected and cut into slices the tasteless melons for our horses. The Hottentots and Bushmen collect these in quantities, and with a stick mash up the inside until it becomes a pulp; and, as the water exudes from the broken cells, they obtain perhaps a mouthful from each melon.
In some parts of the Kalahari Desert it is noticed that there are individual elephants, rhinoceroses, or other animals, that never drink water, having attached themselves to a locality in which they find melons and succulent roots as substitutes. Indeed, we believe that at least one tribe of Namaqua Hottentots live very comfortably in an absolutely waterless country, subsisting chiefly on the milk of their cattle, which in turn quench their thirst solely by eating water melons.
Our fellow traveller, Joseph Macabe, in his arduous journey to Lake Ngami, travelled long distances without water; and one day he had to drive his oxen ten miles to eat water melons, and then to drive them back to the waggons to perform their day’s work. This privilege was duly purchased from the Bushmen who lived near, and who therefore might be supposed to look upon these wild fruits as their own. A line was traced upon the ground; but it required all the efforts of the Bushmen, and the herdsmen too, to make the thirsty cattle understand that they were only to eat within a certain limit.
The beautiful “traveller’s tree” of Madagascar collects and retains through almost the driest seasons a welcome store of water. Its ample leaves point upward to the heavens; and all the rain, dew, or atmospheric moisture from their broad surfaces, is conducted down until it lodges in the hollow formed just above the junction of the midrib with the stem. The natives pierce the leaf-stalk with a spear; the water gushes out, and is caught in a vessel held under to receive it. So unfailing is the supply from these trees, that where one of them is seen no native will trouble himself to walk even a short distance to a river. The most valuable property, however, of this tree is that it may be tapped again and again without vital injury. It is most likely that the orifice will close, and the wounded leaf will again collect water; or, at most, the injured leaf will die off, leaving the others in full vitality. It is different with the collection of palm juice, in which the tree itself is materially injured and often completely destroyed.
On the low lands at the Delta of the Zambesi, where the various species of mangroves have fulfilled their office in winning from the dominion of the ocean the broad sand-banks annually deposited by the river, an abundant growth of the Doum palm and wild date begins to occupy the new formed land. The natives seek those that have grown to not more than a man’s height, and, cutting off all the leaf-stalks with the exception of the merest sprout in the centre to continue the vitality, make a deep incision where the leaves should be, stick in it a bit of folded leaf as a spout, and hang an earthen pot under it by a strip of leaf, sheltering it from the sun by a kind of basket, loosely but ingeniously woven from another leaf in the manner shown in our sketch on [p. 519].
In connection with the subject of water we may here appropriately notice the expedients used by many nations for the separation of juices from the fruit containing them, or for expressing from grain or fibrous substances the water in which they have been washed or steeped, and which may either be collected as holding in solution some nutritious matter, or thrown away as carrying off something distasteful or even poisonous.