Tales of South Africa

H.A. Bryden

"Tales of South Africa"

Chapter One.

The Secret of Verloren Vlei.

It was not until my second season’s hunting with Koenraad du Plessis that I heard of Verloren Vlei, a place I am never likely to forget. Du Plessis was a Transvaal Boer, descended, as his name implies, from that good Huguenot stock which, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, made its way to the Cape to replenish the Dutch settlers. The French language quickly died out in South Africa, mainly from a stern repression; yet here and there, all over that vast land, you may see at this day, in the strong and stubborn Boer breed, plain traces of the French admixture. Du Plessis bore about him very certain indications of his ancestry. He was shortish for a Boer, very dark of complexion, keen-eyed, merry, alert, vigorous and active as a cat.

Nineteen years ago, the north and east of the Transvaal, and the countries just across the border, were wild and little-known lands, still teeming with game. I was wandering through this region, hunting and exploring. The gold-fever had recently broken out, and as I understood something of mining and geology, I put in a good deal of prospecting as well. It was a vagrant, delightful existence, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Du Plessis and I met first in the north of Waterberg. I found him an excellent good fellow; he took to me; and we quickly became great friends. We trekked along the Crocodile River together, crossed it before it takes its southerly bend, and, for the whole of the dry winter season, hunted in a glorious veldt abounding in game. So excellent a comrade had I found the Boer, and so well had we enjoyed one another’s company, that we engaged to meet again the following season. Thus, at the end of July, 1876, we were once more hunting together in that wild and distant region north-east of the Crocodile.

One evening—I remember it well—we were outspanned in a delightful valley between low hills, through which a pleasant stream ran—a rare thing in the prevailing drought. We had had a good hunt that day, and the flesh of a fat buffalo cow filled our stew-pot. Our oxen lay peacefully in a strong thorn kraal close at hand—for there were lions about—and our horses were tied up to the wagon-wheels; the fires blazed ruddily against the outer darkness. At one of these fires were gathered our native boys, feasting and chattering, and laughing in high good humour; at the other, Du Plessis and I sat in our wagon-chairs. We had finished our meal, and were smoking our fragrant Rustenburg tobacco and drinking our coffee; for the day had been hot, and our hunt a long and exciting one, and our thirst was still unassuaged. We were talking about gold and prospecting. The Dutchman was not over-keen about it, but he was anxious to help me.

“There’s a kloof somewhere about here, Fairmount,” (that’s my name), he said, “in which I shot a white rhinoceros five years ago. I should like you to see it; I remember some natives brought me a quill of gold which they had collected up there. I think you would find it worth looking at; but this country is so broken, that I can’t for the life of me make out the exact spot. We shall hit it off presently, no doubt; but just now it’s almost as hard to find as poor Tobias Steenkamp’s ‘Verloren Vlei.’”

“Verloren Vlei,” I replied in Cape Dutch, in which we habitually spoke. “I never heard of the place. Where’s that?”

“Allemaghte! that’s a very queer story,” answered Du Plessis. “Tobias Steenkamp was a cousin of mine. One day four years ago he came to our farm and outspanned. He had had a hard trek, and lost some oxen, and was himself smitten with fever. He stayed a week, and he was for ever talking of a wonderful vlei (Pronounced flay, A vlei is the Dutch name for a shallow lake.) he had discovered somewhere in an inaccessible mountain range in this direction, on the shores of which he had found much gold. He showed us some fine nuggets; and, indeed, he excited my brother Hans and myself so much, that we half promised to go back with him and have a look at the place.

“Well, Tobias got over his fever, obtained fresh oxen, refitted his wagon, and started off again for his wonderful vlei. Hans and I could not get away at that moment; but we meant to hunt in that direction, and we promised to follow him up in a little time. He left a boy with us to show us the road. In two months’ time we had trekked up to the neighbourhood of Tobias’s great discovery, and then we received a shock. We met his driver and servants returning with the wagon, and no master. They told us that they had outspanned near the vlei—which they themselves had never seen; that their master had started off alone up the mountain next morning—he would never permit any of his boys to go with him; and that he had never returned. They had waited and waited, and had then searched for him in every direction without result. For a fortnight this had gone on; and now they had given up the search, and believed their master dead. Well, Hans and I took the men back with us to the mountain again, and made a thorough search, and sent out parties in every direction into the country round. We might as well have looked for the Fiend himself; we never again found a trace of Tobias Steenkamp. He is dead, undoubtedly, and his fate is wrapped in black mystery. How he disappeared, where he went, I cannot say. We did find spoor of a man and donkey to the north-east. The man had disappeared, and the donkey had been eaten by a lion. What their mystery was, I know not either. We found no trace of a passage up the grim mountain-walls where poor Tobias had vanished; and as for the vlei itself, well, Hans and I could make nothing of it. We never set eyes on it, and half doubted its existence. We have always called it since ‘Verloren Vlei,’ and by that name we and our friends still know it. And yet Tobias was no fool; he described the vlei very plainly to us more than once; and he firmly believed in it. Allemaghte! yes, of that I am quite certain; and what’s more, he showed me the gold he had found there. It’s incomprehensible.”

“That’s a queer story of yours, Koenraad,” said I. “I wonder I never heard you mention it before. How far away is this place you speak of?”

“About six days’ journey from here, I suppose,” replied Du Plessis; “and it’s a rough trek.”

“Has any one else ever tried to discover this secret?” I went on.

“Two or three people only,” rejoined the Dutchman. “Tobias’s brother and three other Boers who knew him went on two different occasions; but they came away no wiser than ourselves. Neither Tobias nor his bones have ever come to light.”

We went on chatting by the fire that night, and presently turned into our wagons.

I am bound to confess that the Dutchman’s grim story grew upon and fascinated me. Mystery has always a curious attraction. Here was hidden away some dark episode, in which this simple, unfortunate Boer had lost his life. I determined to try to unravel the clew; and the gold, too, lent an additional motive to the search.

I had small difficulty in persuading Koenraad du Plessis next morning to lead me to the place of misfortune. We settled to trek thither, hunting on our way; and in six days’ time we found ourselves outspanned for the night beneath the loom of the great rock fortress which held so securely the Dutchman’s secret. It was the hour of sunset as we neared the mountain range, which lay between us and the north-west. The sky was a sheet of red and gold, against which the rugged mass stood out in a wonderful relief. Up above the mountain tops, long skeins of great birds, all following one another slowly and majestically in an endless maze of evolutions, were silhouetted black against the flaming heavens. We were a good mile away from the nearest string, but there was a wonderful stillness of the atmosphere; all nature seemed hushed, except for the birds—and the faint notes of their peculiar plaintive whistle told me instantly what they were.

“Why, Koenraad,” I said, “those are pelicans, and they’re just going down to water somewhere in the mountains! See, there they go!”

As I spoke the lower skein sank gently into the mountains, and presently chain after chain of the singular evolutionaries disappeared softly within the range, until the last bird had vanished, and the now fading sky lay clear and unflecked.

“Allemaghte!” ejaculated Du Plessis in his deepest tones; “those are pelicans surely, and they have gone down to water. Strange that I have never seen them there before. There is the vlei, sure enough! We will never rest now till we find it.”

We were up at dawn next morning, and as we breakfasted we saw with intense interest the pelicans rise from the heart of the mountain, slowly circle about the sky, and then stretch their flight, in their leisurely and majestic fashion, in our direction. As they quitted the mountain, they sank lower towards the flat country, and some of them were evidently about to pass right overhead.

“They’ll come over the wagons,” said Du Plessis; “they’re off for that big salt pan we passed yesterday morning.”

I dived into my wagon, and took down my rifle. An idea had struck me. I pushed a cartridge into the breech, and, as the great birds passed slowly a hundred yards overhead, took aim at one and fired. The target was a big and an easy one: the stricken bird toppled downwards, turning over and over in its fall, and presently hit the earth with a tremendous thud. One of the boys ran and brought it to me. I opened its bill. The pouch contained seven fresh fish—six smallish and carp-like, well-known to the Boers as karpers, the seventh a “yellow fish,” a barbel-like fish of a pound and a half.

“Here, Koenraad,” I said to my companion, “is proof positive that your mysterious vlei lies in the mountain and holds water. These fish are fresh—they were caught early this morning; and the birds are away to the salt pan for the day to eat and digest them.”

We finished breakfast hastily, and sallied forth on our search. First, we followed the tiny stream near which we were camped. This led us to the westerly side of the mountain, and manifestly took its rise in some marshy ground immediately beneath the rock walls. A careful examination convinced me that the marsh itself owed its origin to some subterraneous escape—very probably from the vlei itself—from within the mountains. But there was no hope of ingress in that direction. Pursuing our investigations, we rode carefully round the whole western and southern face of the mountain-wall, scanning closely every yard of its surface. This mountain-wall ran in a great semicircle; its dark-red, rampart-like cliffs were sheer, and wonderfully free from projections and undergrowth. We spent the whole day searching for any trace of path or ingress, and retired to our wagons for the evening completely discomfited. There was not foothold for the hardiest cliff climber that ever risked his life in search of wildfowl eggs.

Next morning, we followed this cliff face along the southerly aspect. Here, after a little way, it was met by another mass of mountains, into which it ran, terminating in a chimney-like cul-de-sac at the end of a short narrow gorge. Here, too, apparently, there was no possible approach upward or inward.

“It was here,” said Du Plessis, “that the spoor of my cousin was last seen. His servants tracked him to this spot, and from there no trace of him could be found. It’s a mystery I cannot fathom. He could not possibly have climbed this way.”

We looked up at the dark grim rock walls above us, narrowing so that a foot or two of pale blue sky could alone be seen, and the thing seemed an impossibility. No living man could have made his way up that terrible chimney.

Retracing our steps from this dark ravine, we tried in another direction. All the remainder of that day, and for four long days thereafter, we explored with infinite care and toil the mass of mountain on the south-east, east, and northern side of the place where, from the movements of the pelicans, the lost vlei apparently lay. We had to leave our horses behind on these expeditions; we toiled, climbed, descended, struggled, and fell, often at the risk of our necks and limbs, but were met everywhere by precipices and ravines which absolutely barred us in these directions. The mass of mountain, which trended away to the north-east for some miles, was, although much broken up, accessible with great labour, until we had approached within less than half a mile, as we reckoned, of the mysterious place we sought. Here, sheer and perfectly hopeless precipices shut us out, exactly as had been the case on the open part of the mountain we had first examined. It seemed clear that Verloren Vlei lay within a ring-fence of utterly inaccessible cliff wall.

On the fifth evening after our arrival, we lay wrapped in our sheepskin karosses by the fire, stiffened, sore, and thoroughly disheartened; and yet, evening after evening, just at the glorious time of sunset, the pelicans had come swinging over in their majestic hundreds from the south-east, had skeined and circled in the glowing sky, and had sunk into the heart of the mountain, and at dawn of day as regularly had they departed. The vlei must be there; it was heart-breaking to be baffled in this way.

I lay long that night in my wagon, thinking out some solution of the puzzle, until sleep at last overcame me. While I lay asleep, I had a very singular dream. I dreamed that I sat upon a high cliff of rock, looking down upon a fair lake of water, which lay girt in part by a sandy shore, and surrounded by a ring of mountains. It was sunset, and one end of this lake was white with pelicans. At other parts were gathered flocks of wild-duck, and round about flew bands of the swift desert sand-grouse—Namaqua partridge, as the colonists call them. And occasionally the flights of sand-grouse stooped in their pretty way and drank at the margin of the water. But I saw yet another sight in that singular valley. I saw a tall figure walking by the edge of the lake. Its back was towards me, and, for the life of me, I could not see its face. I gazed and gazed; but the face never turned; and then suddenly the scene vanished, and my dream was over. Again I dreamed, and again I saw the spreading water beneath me, and the wildfowl; but there were no pelicans and no sand-grouse. I saw, too, a figure walking along the shore. This time the figure was different. It was shorter, and the walk was brisker; but again the man’s back was towards me, and his face was hidden. And then, again, the dream faded, and I saw no more.

Next morning, Du Plessis and I sat at breakfast, still stiff and sore, yet in better heart. Our night’s sleep had restored our flagging spirits. We had agreed to rest after our five days of hard work, and have a quiet day at our camp. We were later this morning, and the last of the pelicans were vanishing for their day’s excursion as we sat down to breakfast I was surprised, therefore, as I looked towards the mountain, to see a string of wildfowl—evidently duck—circle a few times in the clear morning sky, and then drop down into the mountains again, exactly from where the pelicans sank and rose. I nudged Du Plessis, whose nose was in his coffee, and pointed. “Wild-duck!” he ejaculated—“the first time we have seen them, too. There is the vlei, truly enough.”

Half an hour later, about nine o’clock, flights of sand-grouse came overhead, and made straight for the heart of the mountain. More and more followed; there must have been many scores of them. They were the first we had seen at this camp.

My dream instantly came into my mind. I attached little importance to such things, yet the coincidence of the wildfowl and the sand-grouse was remarkable, and I told Du Plessis what I had dreamed. Quite in a chaffing way, I said: “We’re going to discover your vlei and its secret after all, Koenraad. Dreams do sometimes come true. I wonder, though, what on earth the two men’s figures could mean?”

Du Plessis was much more serious, and said with a solemn face: “It is not right to laugh at dreams, my friend; the Heer God sends them for some good reason, undoubtedly. I had nearly given this search up as hopeless. We must; yes, allemaghte! we must try again.”

We strolled after breakfast, taking our pipes with us, to the chimney-like cul-de-sac where Tobias Steenkamp’s footprints had been last seen, four years before. The place looked more than ever dark, narrow, and forbidding; and as we stood upon the sandy floor of the ravine and gazed upward to the faint patch of sky showing between the cliffs, two hundred feet above, the sharp contrast made it yet more awesome. For half an hour we looked about us, examining carefully every cranny and projection within our vision. Suddenly a boyish expedient of mine flashed into my mind. I had in my young days in Derbyshire ascended a steep and very narrow fissure in a cliff among my native dales, by copying faithfully the example of a sweep’s boy, whom I had watched climbing the great kitchen chimney. Why not make the attempt here? It looked a tremendous risk, but still it might be accomplished up in the far corner where the cliff-walls ran but a foot or two apart. I had hazarded my limbs many a time as a boy in search of birds’ nests: why not here in pursuit of this mystery which so strangely baffled us? I told my plan to Du Plessis; he evidently thought very little of it. However, as we strolled back to camp, I thought out and discussed my scheme, and, so far as I could, prepared for it in the afternoon. We had at the wagons a long coil of stout rope some one hundred and fifty feet in length. It seemed too short for my purpose, and I fastened to it, therefore, with the greatest care, another seventy feet of strong ox riems—halters of raw hide—carefully lashed one to the other. I thus had over two hundred feet of rope.

Next morning, after a long night’s rest, Du Plessis and I set off for the ravine, taking with us our most useful native servant, Andries, one of the drivers. I carried about my person some billtong (dried meat), matches, a revolver, hunting-knife, and a flask of brandy. Du Plessis was equipped (save for the revolver) in the same manner. Arrived at the extremity of the ravine, we threw down the rope, one end of which I attached to my waist I wore, as usual, only my flannel shirt and a pair of moleskin trousers, and upon my feet I had a pair of velschoens—Boer field-shoes, made of strong yet soft leather of home-tanned hide. These shoes were close-fitting, light, and pliable, and exactly suited my purpose.

I now made my way back to where a sort of ledge ran sloping upwards a little way towards the narrowest part of the ravine—at the end. I carefully climbed this, and found myself, as I had expected, some thirty feet on my way up, and now right in the narrowest extremity of the narrow gorge. At my back was the cliff wall; in front of me was the opposing wall, less than two feet away; on my right was the mass of rock ending the gorge, sometimes uneven and projecting a little, sometimes almost smooth; on my left hand was open space, where the gorge slowly widened out I looked upward in doubt, almost in dismay; I looked down upon Du Plessis’ serious face: it was no use waiting; I took one long breath and began the task. My plan was this: pressing my feet against the wall of rock in front, and planting my back hard against the cliff behind me, I gradually levered my way upwards. I made use of every inequality and jutting rock that could aid me, and occasionally obtained an excellent rest from bits of rock on my right, upon which I could lean, and thus relieve the tension. I worked my way as rapidly as possible, knowing how the strain must tell upon my legs, and, as far as half-way, or a little beyond, progressed better and more speedily than I could have hoped. Now, the labour began to tell more hardly as every ten seconds passed. I was in good sound fettle; I had always been a “stayer”; and my wind was in capital order; but my breath now began to come with difficulty, the sweat was pouring from me, my shirt was ripping off my back, and, worst of all, my legs were failing me. At three-fourths of the distance—about one hundred and fifty feet up—I noticed a projecting rock on the right. I worked up to this with infinite difficulty, and then, leaning my right arm and as much of my body over as possible, I rested for full three minutes. I was now, as I well recognised, in a very serious plight. There were yet fifty more feet of cliff to climb. I had already undergone what seemed superhuman labour, and my muscles were relaxing, my strength and wind were ebbing. To return was as perilous as to go on; to fall meant a shocking death I took out my brandy flask, drained it to the last drop, uttered within myself a half-prayer to a God I had long neglected, hitched up my belt and trousers, and struggled on. If I live to a hundred, I never can forget the terrible nightmare of that last fifty feet. But for the brandy, that put new if fleeting energy into me—it was Three Star, luckily, and I believe it saved my life—I should never have succeeded. I most heartily wished I had never seen Du Plessis, never started on this accursed trip, never offered to risk my life. I struggled on, growing weaker and slower. Once I slipped three or four good feet, and only saved myself by some miraculous luck! The sharp wall behind me laid a deep furrow into my back as I did so, and I felt the warm blood issuing forth and mingling with the sweat that ran from me.

Once more I set my teeth for the last twenty feet. I recovered my ground, and foot by foot fought my way on. The muscles of my legs quivered like aspen leaves; I feared they would give way each moment. At last—I hardly know how—I found my face above the cliff; the sweet outer air met me; I gave a last struggle, got foothold on the right, flung myself forward, and lay upon the cliff top with my feet still projecting over the edge. I remember hearing a faint shout from far beneath me, and then all swam.

When I came to, I suppose I had lain senseless for a quarter of an hour. I was in sorry plight indeed. I was stiff, sore, bleeding from my back, and the poor remnant of my shirt hung in front of me. I staggered to my feet and looked about me. A glance showed me that there were yet difficulties to be overcome before we could descend to the vlei, yet they were not insuperable. The chiefest of them lay in a sharp saddle-back of rock, sheer on either side, which had to be crossed somehow before the main mass of the inner ring of mountain could be attained. But my strength was coming back to me; a sense of triumph and elation over the dreadful task I had conquered rose in my breast; and my determination to pierce the secret of the valley was stronger than ever.

Here and there upon the cliff top grew some wild olive trees, stunted and dwarfed, but strong. To one of these I fastened the end of the rope I had brought up with me. I now approached the edge, lay down, and looked over. Du Plessis was there, gazing anxiously upward. I shook the rope and shouted to him to come up. We had agreed upon this plan, if I succeeded; and he now fastened the lower end of the rope round his waist and began his climb. With the help of the rope it was comparatively easy work. The Dutchman was strong in the arms and active, and came steadily on. Occasionally he unbound the rope, and refastened it at a higher point to his waist, as an insurance against falls. In fifteen minutes he was up beside me. Even his journey had been no light one. He, too, streamed with perspiration; his limbs trembled, and he flung himself to the ground to gather breath and rest.

“Maghte! Fairmount,” he gasped as soon as he had recovered a little breath, “you must have got up by a miracle. Even with that rope, I don’t think I would care to climb the cliff again. ’Tis a job only fit for a klipspringer (a small and very active mountain antelope), not a man!”

We rested full twenty minutes, smoked a pipe of tobacco, and then set about completing the rest of our task. The sharp saddle-back, a bridge of rock which crossed another deep ravine between us and the inner mountain, looked excessively nasty. In some places it was as much as four feet wide; in others it narrowed to as little as two. There were about forty yards of it; and in portions the surface was rugged and sharp.

“Come along, Du Plessis,” I said; “the sooner we’re over the better. The rest seems easy enough.”

The broader part of the bridge came first, and admitted of walking for ten yards. Then it narrowed. I went down upon all-fours, and crawled. It was nerve-shaking work; for the bridge fell away sheer on either side, and the drop of nearly two hundred feet meant a horrible death. In the middle of the bridge the space was too narrow even for crawling; it was necessary to sit astride, and so fudge one’s way along for ten or twelve yards. At last the broader part came again, and in five yards more the solid mountain top and safety were achieved. Du Plessis had followed close behind, imitating carefully my tactics. As we stood up upon safe ground again, I noticed that he was deadly pale. He shook his head, as he looked at me ruefully, and wrung the sweat from his brow. “Man!” he said, “if I had not been shamed into following you, I never would have come across that place, no, not for a thousand Verloren Vleis. You are unmarried and a little foolhardy. I am married, and have a wife and six children pulling at my jacket. I didn’t bargain for these adventures; they are only fit for baboons.”

“Come on, Koenraad,” I replied, laughing. “It’s a nasty crossing, I own; but it’s all plain sailing now, apparently.”

We went on over the mountain for twenty minutes; then came a shallow kloof, thickly bushed at bottom; then another ascent, a rough walk of another half-hour; and then, clearing some more bush and low scrub that grew here upon the mountain top, we came suddenly upon an enchanting scene. “The vlei!” we exclaimed in a burst together, then stood and gasped in very pleasure and bewilderment.

Right below us, ringed in by a perfect amphitheatre of mountain, lay an oval sheet of water, its smooth surface, unruffled by a flaw of wind, shining beneath the ardent sunlight like the mirror of a giantess. This vlei—the long-lost vlei, undoubtedly—was about half a mile long by three hundred yards in breadth. Here and there upon the placid water floated troops of wildfowl; and high in the air hung a fishing-eagle or two, keenly intent upon sport beneath. Immediately below us, the lake seemed deep; but towards the far end, it evidently shallowed, and upon one side of that end grew dense masses of reeds. The shores, save where the reed-beds grew, were in places sandy; elsewhere, of rock. Between the water and the mountain sides, which sloped easily downward, and were well bushed, was an outer ring of reddish soil, masked by a park-like growth of scattered acacia thorns. It was now the month of August, and getting towards African spring-time, and, favoured doubtless by the neighbourhood of the vlei, the acacias were already putting forth a pleasant bravery of green leafage. Birds—many of them of brilliant plumage—were in plenty about this gem-like spot. It seemed that here in this secret place Nature had done her utmost to atone for much of the drought and hardship that at this season lay in the wilderness outside.

For five minutes we stood gazing with a sense of rapture at this goodly scene. We looked keenly hither and thither, but could discern no trace of human existence. Then we descended. We reached the water without great difficulty; upon its margin we lay down and drank long and eagerly. Having thus refreshed ourselves, and eaten some of the little store of food we had brought with us, we set out to explore the vlei thoroughly. The chief thing in our minds was to ascertain the fate of Tobias Steenkamp, whether living or dead. And first we settled to search systematically the side upon which we stood. We looked carefully for traces of spoor, yard by yard along the sand fringing the water. Not a footprint could we discover. Once or twice we came across the tracks of klipspringers and leopards, but no sign of human life was there. We turned back, and searched among the groves of thorny acacia, now fragrant with the strong scent of the rich sweet blossoms, but with the same ill success. It was now late in the afternoon; we passed round the end of the vlei, skirted the reed-bed, and then came upon more rocky formation. It was here that I first convinced myself of the gold-bearing richness of the valley. In a crevice of rock, time-worn by long ages of water-wear and decay, I picked up three smallish nuggets. I am afraid this success rather threw us off the search for Tobias Steenkamp, of which we had already begun to despair. Several times during the day we had raised our voices and hallooed loudly, in faint hopes of an answer. The cliffs eagerly returned us echo after echo, but there was nought else. For the rest of the short afternoon time we scrambled about the rocks, peering into crannies and basins. We had fair success, and by evening had between us gathered some fourteen ounces of gold, all in nuggets.

It was now sundown; already the pelicans had arrived, and were sailing about the sky in marvellous intricacies; the light was going fast, and we must prepare to camp for the night. We had told our men at the wagons not to expect us till next day; they would be therefore under no anxiety. We picked a place not far from the water, where the view was open, and danger from the approach of night ferae minimised. We chose a smooth sandy spot under a wall of rock. In front we made two good fires, and then, having eaten a scant supper, we sat smoking and talking beneath the warm starlight. It was about nine o’clock; we were both becoming drowsy, when Du Plessis suddenly sat bolt upright and listened breathlessly. “Did you hear that?” he whispered in a low, intense voice. “No,” I said, sinking my voice too, for the man’s strange demeanour rather awed me.

“I heard a man groan—or a spook,” he said.

Now, I am not a believer in spooks at any time; yet it was a wild, eerie place, and the senses of these Boer hunters are so preternaturally quickened by long acquaintance with savage life, that I knew Koenraad must have heard something.

I listened intently, and again we both heard a faint groan, as of a man in pain.

“Allemaghte!” whispered Du Plessis, “what, in the name of the Heer God, can it be?” A moment later he clutched me by the arm, and pointing with his right hand, whispered fiercely: “Look! look!”

The moon was now up and shining brightly, and the valley had passed from the dimness of the starlight. I looked where the Boer was pointing, and saw something that sent a shiver down my back. Certainly there was a shapeless something crawling slowly towards the water on our left front, one hundred and fifty yards away. Again came the faint groan we had heard.

“This is bosh,” I said. “It’s a man, undoubtedly, and he’s in pain. It may be your cousin. Come and look.” I sprang to my feet, picked up my revolver, and started off. Du Plessis pulled himself together—he had need, for he was a firm believer in spooks—and followed closely. We approached the creeping thing—it looked more like a man. I hailed it, and again a low groan came. We reached the dark object. It was a man, or the remains of one, emaciated, half-clad in tattered rags; and it crawled upon all-fours, dragging one leg. It was not a Boer—not Tobias Steenkamp. In a flash it came into my mind that here was the second figure, of my strange dream.

“Who are you?” I said.

“Water, for God’s sake!” was all the poor wretch could utter. I ran to the water, filled the top of my felt hat, and came back. The tattered figure drank eagerly.

“Come, Du Plessis,” I said; “let’s carry him up to the camp-fire.”

We picked the poor framework up, and carried it to the fire; it weighed, I suppose, about five stone. Then we got out Du Plessis’ flask, poured out some brandy, mashed up some biscuit and water with it, and administered the mess out of the flask cup. The brandy seemed to revive the poor creature. We gave him a piece of billtong to suck, and at last he spoke.

“I know your face,” he said, looking at me; “don’t you remember Spanish Jack?”

Of course I remembered Spanish Jack, a well-known prospector in the Eastern Transvaal some few years before. Three parts English, one part Spanish, he was one of those restless pioneers who move, Uhlan-like, before the main body of the gold-diggers, always on the hunt for new finds. Looking at the poor death’s-head before me, I could only recognise, in the dark, cavernous eyes and the mass of tangled black hair, the faintest traces of the strong, restless, dare-devil prospector known as Spanish Jack.

“How did you come here?” I queried, and in the same instant, “What’s become of Tobias Steenkamp?” asked Du Plessis in Dutch.

“Give me a drop more brandy,” answered the man in a hoarse whisper, “and I’ll tell you.”

We gave him part of our small remaining stock, with some water, and he went on, speaking, however, with great difficulty.

“I was up in these parts with a donkey and a bit of an outfit four years ago, and I heard from a nigger that a Dutchman had got into this place; and, after a lot of trouble, I found my way in too, from another direction, nor’-east there. I had some grub, and I meant to camp for a week, as alluvial gold was wonderfully plentiful. On the fifth day after I got here, Tobias Steenkamp turned up. It was the second and last trip he made. He was mad to find me here, and told me it was his place, and I was to clear. We quarrelled; he struck me, and in my rage I out with my knife and stabbed him in the chest. He died within an hour. You will find his bones along there under a bit of a cairn near the water. Well, after that I only wanted to get out of the place. I took what gold I had picked up, and started up the mountain again. In my hurry I was careless; I fell, broke my right thigh, and here I have been ever since. My leg healed in a rough sort of way; but there’s a false joint; the bone kept coming away, and I could never walk properly again. I managed to pick up food by snaring fowl and catching fish; but latterly I’ve been too weak to do that. For the last month I’ve been slowly starving. Lizards and roots are what I’ve lived on—that’s God’s truth. My leg’s been getting worse, and I’ve had to crawl, mostly, these last three months. I never expected to reach the water again after to-night, and then I think I should have pinched out. Time enough, too. This place has been worse than hell itself.”

There was a hunted terror in the man’s eye that implied more than his words. I doubted somehow whether I had heard the plain truth. The poor wretch was by this time exhausted, and could say no more. I gave him, at his request, a piece of tobacco; he clapped it into his cheek, and thought he could doze a bit.

I turned to Du Plessis, who had meanwhile, with very grim looks, edged away from the man who, he understood from me (I had translated the gist of the prospector’s story), had slain his cousin. His feeling of vengeance was strong—remember, he was but a primitive Transvaal Boer; but what could even he say, as we looked at this poor travesty of a man, this living skeleton, with its broken, deformed leg, that now slept, huddled up to the fire as closely as the starved Bushman of the Kalahari?

It was now late, and Du Plessis and I, too, lay down and slept; the day had been long and hard, and we were dog-tired. The dawn was cold; and coatless, almost shirtless, as I was, I awoke early, very stiff and sore. Du Plessis had a cord coat on; he yet slept soundly, and even snored. But the figure across the fire seemed very still. I moved quietly to it, touched it gently. It was stiff and cold. Spanish Jack’s troubles and agonies were over; his prospecting was done; and for the blood upon his hands he would never answer upon this earth. Whether he died from the excitement of the meeting; whether that last agonising journey to the water had spent the remaining flicker of strength left within him; whether the story he had told us of Tobias Steenkamp’s death was the true one, I cannot tell.

I roused Du Plessis. Together we went down towards the vlei and found the pile of stones, where, surely enough, the bones of a tall man—undoubtedly Tobias Steenkamp—lay. These we carefully replaced; then, exploring up-hill from where we had come upon the prospector, we found a cave or hollow in which the poor wretch had evidently made a home. Here were Steenkamp’s hat and hunting-knife, among other remnants; and here, too, a pile of nuggets, no doubt collected by Spanish Jack. These nuggets, with a small skin bag partly full of gold-dust, washed, no doubt, from the sands of the vlei—a small tin digger’s pan of Spanish Jack’s showed us that—we took with us. After that, we buried the dead prospector as well as we could, piled big stones above his rude grave, and quitted the place.

We had no wish to tarry there, fair as was the spot. Rather the grim associations of the vlei, the deed of blood enacted there, and the melancholy death we had been witnesses of, impelled us away from it.

After much toil, we safely reached our wagons late that afternoon, worn and famished. We had, somehow, no wish to bequeath to others the secret of the vlei. Having safely descended by the rope, therefore, we set about destroying our traces. Two of our boys were waiting for us at the bottom of the ravine. With these we took a united haul at the rope. The strain was great; the rope parted, as we had expected, far up the cliff, where the hide riems joined the rope itself, and no vestige of our means of descent remained to searchers from below. Next day we trekked from the neighbourhood. The gold we had found realised, some months later, seven hundred pounds, which Du Plessis and I divided between us.

Verloren Vlei, with its smiling face, its dark history, and its wealth of gold—for gold must be there in abundance—lies, I believe, to this day still a secret and an unknown place. No doubt the pelicans and the sand-grouse that first revealed its mysteries to Tobias Steenkamp and ourselves, still visit it in time of drought—towards the driest period of African winter. Some day, I suppose, its recesses will be made accessible and its wealth laid bare. For others that day may come; but for ourselves, neither Koenraad du Plessis nor I have any wish—having prospered in other directions—to tempt fortune there again.

Chapter Two.

A Bushwoman’s Romance.

Nakeesa, the Bushwoman, awoke just as dawn crept upon the silent veldt. She belonged to that strange houseless race of wild hunters who roam the waterless, illimitable deserts of the North Kalahari, subsisting sometimes on game, at other times upon roots, reptiles, and berries.

It is needless to say that Nakeesa lay roofless. A little screen of branches, interwoven with a friendly bush, sheltered her and her sleeping husband and her child from the chill south wind that just now began to move through the desert. It was June—midwinter—and the night had been keen even to frostiness—so cold that Nakeesa had lain almost in the fire through the long hours. Her short hartebeest-skin cloak, and the tiny skin petticoat about her loins, only half protected her gaunt, three-quarter starved frame. The baby had nestled in the warmest corner of her cloak, as near to the fire as might be without burning. So close had Nakeesa lain to the pleasant warmth, that the shins of her poor bony legs were burnt raw, as they had been for weeks past. Her man, Sinikwe, lay scorched in exactly the same way.

You may never, indeed, see a Masarwa Bushman or woman who does not show marks of fire-burn upon the nether limbs. Among the old people, if you look close enough, you may see that their wrinkled breasts and bellies are scorched and raw also.

Nakeesa sat up, pushed a half-burned stick or two into the smouldering fire, and looked about her. Sinikwe lay still asleep. There was no need to wake him, and, indeed, he would resent such interference. She looked about her in a dull, rather hopeless way. There was no food in the camp—if camp it could be called. Sinikwe had shot or snared no meat of late. Drought lay upon the desert, and game was scarce. In a little while she must be digging for roots in the hard sunbaked soil, and her babe would be crying at her lean, starved breast. All day yesterday had she been sucking water from a moist hole in the ground, and discharging it from her mouth into ostrich shells and a calabash—a sufficiently fatiguing operation in thirsty soil. But these things alone hardly troubled Nakeesa. They were natural incidents of Bushman life, and scarce needed regrets. Something deeper and more bitter lay within her soul—something that even her cowed, submissive nature constantly rebelled against.

Twelve months since, Nakeesa’s father had handed her over to Sinikwe, who, for the consideration of two solid brass cartridge cases (articles much prized by Masarwas as snuff-boxes) and the half of a slain eland, had bought her as wife. Now Nakeesa had no great admiration for Sinikwe. He was a good hunter, it was true; all Masarwas are. But he was lazy, and not very amiable; he was ugly even for a Bushman; and she had had another youth in her eye. Kwaneet—the pleasant, merry Kwaneet—who had shown her several little kindnesses at Makwa Pool, and had presented her with many titbits of flesh, while their respective families squatted near that water, was the man of her secret choice.

Kwaneet, too, knew this, and was anxious to link his fortunes with Nakeesa’s; but, most unfortunately, Sinikwe had acquired the coveted cartridge cases from an English hunter, and had secured his wife. Kwaneet, it is true, could easily have slain an eland, and had offered to do so; but though, like Sinikwe, he carried at his neck—as every decent Masarwa should—his own well-polished brass cartridge case, as snuff-box, he had not two spare ones to offer Nakeesa’s father; and so he had lost Nakeesa, and Sinikwe had taken her.

Nakeesa’s eyes, as she squatted over the fire this morning, ranged over typical Kalahari scenery. In front of her lay an open grassy clearing, yellow with sun-parched winter grass. This and other glades in the vicinity Sinikwe meant to set fire to in a day or two, in order to renew the vegetation, as the first rains came on, and so attract the game. Beyond the clearing, and upon the left hand and right, stretched the pleasant open forest of the desert—groves of giraffe-acacia (kameel doorn), through which still wander freely in these pathless, waterless solitudes the tall giraffe, the portly eland, the brilliant red hartebeest, and the noble gemsbok (prototype of the fabled unicorn).

This Kalahari forest scenery, flat though it is, is very beautiful, resembling closely some English deer park, or the natural woodland of some wild Surrey common.

The deep red glow of sunrise was now apparent through the trees to the eastward, long streamers of rose-pink flew upwards in the pale sky; a roller or two, brilliant in gorgeous colouring of metallic mauves and violets, purples, blues, and greens, began to cry amid the forest, and to flash hither and thither across the clearing. Dainty steinboks and timid duykers (small antelopes, quite independent of water, to be found all over the desert) rose stiff from their cold night couches, shook themselves, and began to feed.

Suddenly a movement to the right attracts Nakeesa’s attention. She looks again, and an involuntary click of surprise and pleasure rises to her tongue. She touches her man lightly. Sinikwe is awake and upon his haunches in an instant; his narrow, bleared eyes seek what Nakeesa has seen, and they watch together in a motionless silence.

From behind a spreading acacia tree, from which it has been plucking the green leafage, strides into a little glade of the grove a great cow giraffe. She is fat and fresh, her dappled, orange-tawny hide gleams under the now risen sun with high condition, her great, melting, dark eye is placid and free from fear. Timid creature though she is, in these wilds she feels secure enough. She halts for a minute in the glade, lazily champing at a bit of acacia leafage which projects from her lips, and, raising her immense neck yet higher, and in the same motion swinging her head easily round, looks behind for her fellows. That giraffe cow, so plump, so well coloured, upon which Sinikwe’s eye is now fiercely rivetted, is young, but full grown. She measures seventeen good feet from the base of her hoofs to the tip of her false horns, as she stands there, and you may search all Africa—ay, all the world—for a more wonderful, more beautiful picture of feral life in its most primaeval form.

There is no air of wind blowing from the Masarwas towards the giraffe; the breeze trends rather the other way, and they are safe from betrayal by that foe. They are concealed from sight by the screen of bush beneath which they crouch, and a few handfuls of sand, cast by Sinikwe upon the smouldering fire, silently destroys that evidence of human life.

In another minute the great creature swings her head round, satisfied that her fellows are near, and stalks slowly on. She is but sixty yards away now, and, passing another group of trees and some bush, emerges upon the open glade. Before she has reached the further side, the rest of the troop are to be seen following in her wake. There are six of them in all: a mighty dark chestnut bull, nineteen feet tall, three more cows, and two calves. The beautiful giants stride like strange automatons across the clearing, with that gliding, deceptive walking pace of theirs, and join the leader at a great spreading acacia, from which they all begin to pluck, with upstretched necks and prehensile tongues, the dark-green foliage.

Sinikwe’s eyes had greedily followed the great cow in all her movements. That is the quarry he means to strike for. Luckily he had smeared his tiny bone-tipped reed arrows with fresh poison taken from the entrails of the N’gwa caterpillar only yesterday. He now picks up his bow and quiver, slings the latter across his back, and steals away by a circuitous route to intercept the troop. It is three hours before he gets his shot. At length, after infinite patience and manoeuvring, he has wormed himself into a patch of thick bush, by which, as he had reckoned, the great cow would pass. Stooping on one knee, he harbours there, motionless as some bizarre figure of bronze; the cow glides past, like some great desert ghost; Sinikwe lets fly his arrow deep into the thinnest part of her tough hide, under the hinder part of the belly; the startled creature flies crashing through the forest, and the Masarwa knows that with her death is now only a question of hours. It may be a day, or two days, or even three, but the poison already at work is fresh and at its deadliest; the arrowhead went well home, and the cow is his.

He returns to Nakeesa, gives her the news, and sends her into the grass veldt to dig up roots, while he himself prepares to make snuff. Taking her babe on her back, neatly slung in her skin cloak, Nakeesa hies her to a likely spot. She takes also with her an empty tortoiseshell in which to bring home the bulbs, and a sharp-pointed stick garnished at top with a circular piece of soft stone. With this last implement she can the more easily crow up their dinner.

Out there in the hot sun Nakeesa patiently digs and digs, slowly accumulating the dish of roots. The red sandy soil is now burning hot to the touch; there is no inch of shade from the scorching sun, and she has not tasted food or water for twenty hours. These things trouble the Bushwoman not at all; they have always been a part of her existence, and she cannot imagine a world without toil and heat, hunger and thirst. Just now, too, she is somewhat comforted at the thought of a mighty feast of meat in the not distant future. Sinikwe is lazy, and time after time neglects to hunt game when Kwaneet—Kwaneet is often in her mind—would have brought in good store of flesh. But Sinikwe, to give him his due, is as good a hunter and spoorer as any in the wide Kalahari, if the game is nigh and not far to seek. She knows that the giraffe is as good as dead, that soon, for a few brief days, she may revel in a gross plenty, and that her babe will be less petulant again. In two hours Nakeesa has filled the tortoiseshell and returns to her man.

Sinikwe, meanwhile, has been having an easy time, preparing a fresh supply of snuff against his coming spooring operations and the feast that is to follow. Out of the dead fire he has extracted some ash from a particular sort of bush which he put in last night. This he works down to the finest possible consistency. Taking from a leather pouch a tiny piece of tobacco—the precious gift of a Lake trader—he cuts off a piece, and in turn reduces that to fine dust by means of flat stones. Then carefully mingling the ashes and the tobacco dust, and again grinding them down together, his snuff is made. With this prized commodity he can refresh his jaded senses upon a difficult spoor, titillate his nerves after a big gorge of flesh, and purchase the pleased glances of his wife when in his bounty he shall deign to bestow a pinch or two upon her. Besides his snuff-making, an operation demanding the gravest care, Sinikwe has sharpened up the blade of his only spear, at once his weapon of defence, carver and skinning-knife, to the haft of which he has fastened his skin cloak and a small calabash of water in preparation for the journey before him. He has sharpened, too, his primitive hatchet, used for chopping bones and extracting marrow. That hatchet—the head of iron, the haft of rhinoceros horn—is Sinikwe’s most treasured possession. His father acquired it long since, at infinite cost of feathers and ivory from the Bechuana who fashioned it.

Presently Nakeesa comes in, and the roots—curious little smooth bulbs, sweet and nutty to the taste—are divided, three-fourths to Sinikwe, one-fourth to Nakeesa. These bulbs are bestowed in thin transparent crops taken from dead guinea-fowls, which are now softened in water for the purpose. A skewer of wood is run throughout several; in half an hour the sun has again dried these curious receptacles, and the Bushman’s bread supply is complete. Taking his lion’s share of the food, and munching a few bulbs before he departs, Sinikwe now exchanges with his wife a few sentences in that curious, whining, inarticulate form of speech peculiar to the Bushman, every passage of it as full of clicks as tongue, throat, teeth, and palate can make it; shoulders his belongings, and sets off briskly upon the spoor of the wounded giraffe.

Nakeesa is to follow him at leisure; she will, you may swear, be up at the carcase long before Sinikwe has made much havoc with it. But she has to carry more water and the child, and will take her own time. She devours a few bulbs and then goes to the water-pit. At present there is no water there, only some moist sand in a deep hollow. But Nakeesa knows what she is about. To the end of a hollow reed she has fastened a tuft of grass. This she inserts into the damp hole which she scoops from the sand. Then she kneads sand round the base of her rude pump and over the tuft of grass and sucks. Little by little the water thus collected reaches and fills her mouth, from which it is discharged, by means of a thick stalk of desert grass, into an ostrich shell. It is hard work and slow, but in two hours Nakeesa has filled her three remaining ostrich shells. These and some others, the holes of which are all carefully sealed with grass, she bestows in a rude net of fibre.

With this load, together with a calabash of water, her babe, her larder and household gear (the bulbs, a steinbok skin, and the tortoiseshell), she sets off on her way towards that banquet of giraffe flesh for which her soul now pines. It is a long, long journey, but she has no trouble whatever in following Sinikwe’s spoor. She traces it to the spot where the Masarwa set off upon the tracks of the wounded cow, and then, mile after mile through the desert, she deciphers easily the familiar tale that slowly the earth unfolds to her. The giraffe is strong and lusty, and the poison takes long to do its work upon so huge a frame.

Nakeesa toils on doggedly with her load. She sleeps the first night (she started in the afternoon) in a belt of Mopani forest. At earliest dawn, as soon as she can see spoor, she is away again steadily trudging. It is weary work. The white glare of the sun upon the light calcareous sand, through which she ploughs all morning, is trying enough; yet infinitely more distressing is it when she crosses the four miles of a vast salt pan. The blinding glare thrown up from the flat white surface of the pan makes even the seasoned eyes of a Bushwoman throb and smart, and the heat is terrible.

There is a gleam of satisfaction even upon the salt pan, however. Nakeesa sees plainly enough by the spoor that the giraffe cow is in sore trouble. Here she has reeled, there spurned the smooth white sand as she starts off again at speed, galled into frenzy by the poison that now runs riot through her veins. And ever, like bloodhound upon a trail, run the footprints of Sinikwe side by side with the giraffe spoor. Nakeesa sees that he has put on his hide sandals, so burning is the glittering white sand. So plain is the tale to her eyes that Nakeesa knows now surely enough that to-morrow by noon she will rest by the dead carcase.

In the hottest hour of afternoon, as she mounts with a sense of relief the further edge of the great salt pan, Nakeesa sees a figure coming towards her. Who can it be? Not Sinikwe, certainly. In five minutes her old lover, Kwaneet, stands before her. They squat them down beneath a solitary Mopani tree, whose bifid, butterfly-like leaves (now parched and shrivelled), turned ever edgewise to the sun, afford them the scantiest shade, and exchange greeting. Kwaneet takes a little—a very little—of the precious snuff from the cartridge case at his neck, and offers his friend a pinch from the palm of his hand. With a gratitude almost too great for words Nakeesa takes and enjoys the precious stuff. What a relief! No dainty cup of afternoon tea was ever so grateful to fashionable dame as that pinch of snuff to the weary Masarwa woman. Her eyes sparkle a little, she plucks up energy again.

“So, Kwaneet!” she says. “Have you had water? Whence come you?”

“There is no water,” replies the Masarwa. “I am eaten up by the sun. Two mornings agone I drank a little. I go to Makwa, where there may be yet a little. And I shall there hunt for hartebeest-skins against the coming of Khama’s headmen. What news have you, Nakeesa? I saw the print of Sinikwe’s sandal yonder, following the Ng’habe,” (giraffe), “and so came on this way, knowing I should meet you. How goes life with you?”

“There is no news,” returned Nakeesa. “I heard some lies only from the Bakalahari at Bachukuru fountain. Khama’s men are hunting in Mababi. As for me and my babe, we starve. Sinikwe has done no hunting till yesterday for moons past. Better had it been if thou hadst been my man, Kwaneet!”

“Come with me now, Nakeesa,” replied Kwaneet. “I will find thee meat. We will go far,” (pointing north) “and defy Sinikwe.”

“Nay, I dare not,” answered Nakeesa. “Sinikwe would follow and slay us in our sleep. I dare not. Be patient. Something may happen. Our life is short, and has many dangers.”

During this interview Nakeesa had been turning over something in her mind. The snuff and its pleasures quite decided her. She took an ostrich eggshell from her burden, cleared the orifice of grass, and offered water to Kwaneet. The Masarwa drank half the contents of the shell, then returned it to Nakeesa.

“Thanks for the drink; the water is good. But what will Sinikwe say?”

“Oh, that is nothing,” returned the woman. “I spilled the water, did I not? and Sinikwe must do his worst. If he returns this way he will know who had it. I cannot help it. You are my friend—and far more.”

Nakeesa knew there would be trouble about the water. She herself had had but one sip since she started. She dared to take no more. But she knew her risk, and cheerfully accepted it—for Kwaneet’s sake. In ten minutes they parted and went their ways. Bushmen are not a demonstrative folk, and there was little fuss on leave-taking.

Not a little cheered by the meeting with Kwaneet, Nakeesa held steadily on her course till sundown, and for the second night slept upon the spoor of her husband and the now dying giraffe. Again with the earliest streaks of light she rose and pursued her journey. Her babe was very fretful. She herself yearned for the end of the travel; even for a Bushwoman ground nuts are but poor sustenance for a three days’ foot journey, under a heavy load, and smitten by a parching sun. Only the immense vitality and the silent capacity for endurance characteristic of these desert-bred Masarwas sustained her. In the early cool of this fair African morning Nakeesa passed through tracts of leguminous bush, decked in a bravery of lilac-coloured blossom. As she emerged upon a broad opening, a troop of noble gemsbok stood at gaze at fifty paces, then cantered leisurely away, their long, spear-like horns glinting to the sunlight. But neither the splendour of the dawn, nor the pleasant flowers, scarcely even the great antelopes, had any attraction for Nakeesa’s eyes.

At last, just upon hot noon, Nakeesa looked skywards, and saw against the hard, torrid glare bands of vultures wheeling and circling high above the earth. There, at last, was her goal. Below the foul birds the giraffe undoubtedly lay dead. Sinikwe’s presence alone kept them aloof. In half an hour Nakeesa stood by the carcase and greeted her husband. Sinikwe paused in his operations—he was chopping ribs from the huge frame, and from head to foot was smeared and stained with blood. For once he was in a good humour; blood and meat had rendered him mellow, as with wine. The day passed in butchering and drying meat, in a continual round of feasting. At night, by the fire, Sinikwe, utterly gorged and drunk with flesh, lay down to sleep. Nakeesa had had enough, but she had not eaten in so gross a manner as her lord. Even to the woman of the desert there seem intuitively to come restraints and limits, which to the man are unknown.

The stars came sparkling forth in their hosts, the deep indigo hollow of space intensifying their marvellous brightness. Amid that galaxy of diamonds, the Southern Cross, Orion’s Belt, the Great Dog, Centaurus, Cetus, and many another constellation, stood majestic.

Presently the weird, shrill wail of the jackal and the hideous cry of hyaenas told that even in these dry wastes the night creatures were wandering in search of food. These sounds disturbed not Nakeesa, though she heard them; she knew that the fire and the presence of human life would sufficiently protect the giraffe’s carcase. There were no lions so far from water. Towards midnight the risen moon, now nearly at her full, shone broad upon the veldt. Her intense brightness made clear all things upon the desert, and paled the stars. The night grew very chill as the hours crept by. Unconsciously, Nakeesa and her man lay yet closer to the fire. It was an hour past midnight when Nakeesa suddenly awoke. Neither the strong moonlight nor the fretful cries of the jackals had roused her, but an almost imperceptible vibration of the sand somewhere near. What danger was it? Very softly she raised her head and peered from beneath her cloak. Yes, she was right; there, ten yards away, something crawled over the dry red sand. Under the amazing brilliancy of the moon it was quite clear to Nakeesa what the thing was. It was a great puff-adder; and the gentle vibration of the reptile’s scales against the sand, as it slowly crawled, had aroused her.

The moon shone bright against one side of the loathsome creature, making clear beneath its searching rays the flat venomous head, the vile, wicked eye, nay, even the very scales of the swollen serpent. Upon the other side, as Nakeesa saw, a narrow band of ink-black shadow moved with the slow motion of the reptile. All this Nakeesa noted instantly. What enthralled her attention yet more was the direction in which the puff-adder headed. It made directly for Sinikwe, attracted instinctively by the promise of warmth. At any other time, probably, the Bushman would have awakened—his instincts would have warned him; but now, overcome by the debauch of flesh, he slept on.

Meanwhile, as the snake slowly approached her man, something like a struggle arose in Nakeesa’s breast. Conscience goes for little in the wilds, yet something like conscience told her that if the puff-adder reached Sinikwe and caused his death, hers was the blame. But, she argued, he is a desert man and can surely protect himself. She ignored wilfully his gorged, helpless slumber; she thought only of Kwaneet, of her own wrongs. After all, human life is of small account with the Bushman; he must take his risks. She had seen her own mother’s corpse half devoured by a lion; her brother had died disembowelled by a buffalo’s horn. What is death in the desert? Here was fate in the form of a puff-adder. Why should she interfere with it? So reasoned Nakeesa as the moments fled. The serpent reached Sinikwe; it crawled slowly, slowly beneath a corner of his skin cloak, close to his breast and arm, and lay still.

For two hours Nakeesa lay watching in a frozen silence the end of this terrible business. At last Sinikwe stirred. The weight of his body shifted heavily on to the snake; there was a struggle beneath the cloak, a dreadful cry arose from the Bushman, and then, like a mad thing, Sinikwe leapt to his feet. The hideous reptile, its long curved fangs still fixed deep in the man’s breast, hung on, as these snakes will do. Sinikwe took the vile creature by the neck, tore it from its hold, and flung it to earth. Nakeesa meanwhile had sprung up, as if from sleep, and snatched up the assegai. With a blow she broke the serpent’s back, and then with the sharp blade cut off its head.

But for Sinikwe life was now as good as ended. Despite his Bushman remedies, the poison quickly overpowered him. After an hour and a half of dreadful pain, gallantly borne, he fell into a torpor. As the sun rose he lay upon the sand there dead.

An hour after sunrise Nakeesa quitted the spot. She left the body to the vultures and jackals and hyaenas. A Bushman needs no burial. Taking as much meat as she could carry, the unfinished water, and her child, she set off to join Kwaneet. It was a long two days’ journey, this time cheerfully endured. Before sunset of the second day, she squatted herself down by the side of the man of her choice, at the water of Makwa.

“I am here, Kwaneet,” she said. “Sinikwe is dead. A snake slew him at night by the giraffe. Take me, I am thine.”

So Kwaneet, not displeased, took Nakeesa to wife, and for a year or more they wandered about the desert, hunting, drinking at this pit and that; sometimes, when the drought gripped that thirsty land, devouring the bitter water-melons in place of drink, as they roamed the great deserts and followed the game. Those were the pleasantest days of Nakeesa’s hard life. She had never known flesh so abundant; they wandered far afield into the most secluded haunts of the game, and Kwaneet had never been so successful in his hunting. Moreover, Kwaneet was neither a difficult man to live with, nor a hard master, and Nakeesa, by nature, like many Masarwa women, a great conversationalist, soon found herself acquiring a strong influence over the simple, easily managed hunter. Yet she had a great affection for Kwaneet, and tempered her sway with many little amenities.

In their second winter together the drought had been intense; not a pit or sucking-hole held water in the desert, there were no melons, and the game had nearly all trekked for the rivers. And so Kwaneet and Nakeesa, too, had quitted the open veldt and the waterless forest, and lived temporarily on the banks of the upper Tamalakan, north-east of Lake Ngami.

One morning Kwaneet came back to their camping-place with a piece of welcome news. Half a mile away he had found the carcase of a fat zebra, killed by a lion quite recently, and only a quarter devoured. Here was a ready-made feast, without the trouble of hunting. Nakeesa had two children now; her elder, a boy, by Sinikwe, a precocious little Bushman imp, could toddle alone; her younger, Kwaneet’s son, she still carried. They set off together along the river, which was now swarming with bird life. Roseate flamingoes and ibises, lovely egrets, storks and cranes and herons, were to be seen decking the shallows. Charming jacanas with chestnut plumage, white and golden gorgets, long legs, and the slenderest spidery feet, ran in little troops upon the thinnest film of floating vegetation. Great spur-heeled Senegal cuckoos flapped heavily from one reed-bed to another. Duck, geese, widgeon, and teal thronged the spreading waters, and clamoured incessantly. A hippopotamus or two blew in the distance; sluggish crocodiles floated, log-like yet watchful, in middle stream. For the Masarwas, who love the dry deserts, and shun the haunts even of black mankind, all this wealth of river-life seemed a very welcome and a very novel change. But then there was a kraal of Makobas within five miles, which was a drawback.

It was not long before they came to the dead zebra, which lay in a little opening from the river, surrounded by dense bush. Kwaneet went first. He walked up to the carcase and stooped to examine it. As he did so there was a fierce, guttural growl from the bush nearest to him, a lightning-like flash of a yellow body, and in an instant he lay there beside the zebra, a great yellow-maned lion standing over him. The brute stood with bared teeth, snarling in fiercest wrath. Kwaneet had driven him from his prey that morning, it is true, but he had bided his time, and now his revenge had come. For once the Masarwa had made a miscalculation. As a rule the lion, driven from its prey in daylight will steal away without showing fight. This particular lion happened to be very hungry and very daring; there were not many hunters in that country, and so Kwaneet had suffered.

But in the instant that the lion made his rush and stood over the Masarwa, many things thronged into Nakeesa’s brain. Her man there, from whom she had received so many kindnesses, and with whom she had lived so happily—nay, for a Bushwoman, so merrily—lay there in dire peril. Surely his life was better than hers. Surely she could strike a blow for him? Her babes, herself, all other things, were forgotten; she must save Kwaneet, the best, and kindliest, and bravest hunter of all that wilderness. She had Kwaneet’s assegai upon her shoulder. With this she ran in upon the lion, and with all her force drove home the blade deep into its ribs.

The wound was not a mortal one—at the moment—and the enraged brute turned instantly at Nakeesa, struck her to earth, and then fastened his teeth, with a hideous, crunching sound, deep in the bones of her neck. For a good half minute it continued this deadly work, then, noticing the year-old child, crying in the back of the woman’s cloak, it gripped that also between its teeth, and put an end to it. Meanwhile Kwaneet, almost uninjured by the lion’s first rush, had crawled away unnoticed, and, with Nakeesa’s elder lad, regained a place of safety.

So Nakeesa lay there dead by the river, her days of toil and of pleasure all ended. She had shown two great extremes of evil and good in her nineteen years of existence. She had refused to save the life of Sinikwe (the man who treated her ill, and whom she loathed) from the puff-adder—an act as good as murder, most men will say. And for Kwaneet, who had treated her with some kindliness, and whom she loved with as much love as a Masarwa is capable of, she had given her whole being—life itself. She could do no more.

As for Kwaneet, having satisfied himself, without much emotion, at a later period of the day, of the death of his wife and child, and having taken as much zebra meat as the lion had left, he went his way. Nakeesa’s elder child—now three years old—was, of course, a perfectly useless encumbrance to him. He therefore sold the boy to some Batauana people for a new assegai, and soon after returned to his desert life.

Nakeesa’s bones are long since scattered, broken, and devoured by the beasts of the desert; but her skull, a little, round, smooth skull, lies there, yellow and discoloured, in the far swamps of the Tamalakan river. Her poor, squalid, desert love-story can scarcely be said to point a moral, or even adorn a tale. It merely affords one more instance of the complex nature of the human heart—of human emotions—even in the crudest and most savage aspect of African life.

Chapter Three.

A Desert Mystery.

One of the cheeriest of Christmas Days was that spent on the pleasant banks of the Limpopo River, not many years since. Two hunting friends were trekking through Bechuanaland towards the Zambesi, and it happened by great good fortune that, just at the junction of the Notwani and Limpopo Rivers, they found outspanned the wagons of two hunters and traders southward bound from the far interior. These men were travelling down-country with heavy loads of ivory, ostrich feathers, skins, and other produce, and they had with them a big troop of cattle obtained in barter. In these fitful encounters in the African wilderness men are always well met, and it needed no pressing from the new-found acquaintances to induce them to outspan together, and combine forces for Christmas cheer and Christmas chatter. A brief council of war soon settled the all-important question of commissariat. Smallfield, the younger of the traders, had shot a good rooibok the evening before, which furnished venison for all, and they had already baked a store of bread from fresh Boer meal. The new-comers, on their side, freshly equipped from Kimberley, could provide tinned plum-puddings, tinned tomatoes, peas, jams, and other luxuries, including dried onions, most precious of vegetables in the veldt; and they had further some excellent Scotch whisky. They had, besides, half a dozen brace of guinea-fowl and pheasants, shot during the day in the jungles bordering the river, so that all the concomitants of a capital African banquet were ready to hand.

Just at sundown the preparations were complete, and no merrier party, you may swear, ever sat down to their Christmas meal. They supped by the light of a roaring camp-fire, eked out by a lantern or two placed on the cases that served for tables. The servants were enjoying themselves at another fire at a little distance; the oxen lay peacefully at their yokes; the wagons loomed large alongside, their white tents reflecting cheerfully the ruddy blaze of the fire; the night was perfect, still and warm, and the stars, like a million diamond sparks, scintillated in the intense darkness of the dome above. What wonder, then, that all felt happy and contented?

Supper at length over, the coffee-kettle was banished to obscurity and the whisky produced. The travellers lit their pipes and toasted their absent friends and each other, and then ensued a long and delightful evening.

The traders were two capital, manly fellows, well versed in the sports and toils and pleasures of the far interior; the new-comers themselves had been in the hunting veldt before, and they had all, therefore, many things in common. Many and many a yarn of the chase and adventure they exchanged; many a head of gallant game they slew again by the cheerful blaze. The up-country trekkers mentioned that they thought of trying a new bit of veldt, rather away from the beaten track, if but they could find water in the desert, and good guides and spoorers—they were bent on entering the wild and little-known tract of country north of the road to the Mababi veldt. “Well,” said the elder of the traders—Kenstone was his name—“you’ll find game there after the rains—giraffe, gemsbok, hartebeest, eland, koodoo, roan antelope, and perhaps a few elephant, or a rhinoceros or two. But it’s a wild, barren veldt; the country as you go north is a good deal broken, and, unless the rains have been good, water is terribly scarce there. As for myself,” (gazing rather moodily at the camp-fire, and stroking his thick, brown beard), “I once went into that veldt, and never wish to see it again. I had a most uncanny adventure there—an experience I never again wish to repeat if I live to a hundred. In all the years (and they are close on five-and-twenty now) I have been in the hunting veldt, I never spent so incomprehensible and horrible a time as the few days I am thinking of. Ugh!” and the big man shivered as he spoke.

Naturally the curiosity of his audience was at once excited. The younger trader, Smallfield, spoke first.

“Why, George,” he said, “I never heard you speak of that country. I never even knew you had been in it. What’s the yarn? It must be something out of the common if it gives you the blues. You’re not sentimental, as far as I remember.”

“No, Jim,” returned Kenstone, “I never mentioned the thing to you or to any one else, bar, perhaps, two or three folks. It’s eleven years gone since it all happened. My old partner, Angus (he’s down in the Colony now), who was with me at the time, knows all about it, and I reported some of the circumstances to a Transvaal Landdrost when we got back. Otherwise I have never talked about the matter—I should only be chaffed, and it’s not a pleasant topic at the best of times. It gave me a very nasty schrijk (Fright) at the time, I remember. However, it’s all far enough away now; if you and these gentlemen would like to hear the yarn, as it’s Christmas-time, and we’re so well met, why, I’ll break my rule and tell you all about it. And mind, what I tell you are solid facts. You know I don’t ‘blow,’ Jim, or spout tall yarns for the benefit of down-country folks or bar-loafers at Kimberley. What I saw I saw, and, please God, hope never to see again.”

All were as keen as mustard for the story, and Kenstone went on.

“Well, let me fill my pipe, and give me another soupje of whisky, and,” (nodding a health to his hearers over his glass) “here goes:—

“It was in ’74 that Angus and I were making our third trip to the Lake N’gami country. This time we had got leave from Khama to trade and hunt in Mababi and the Chobé River country; and we meant to push even beyond, to the region between the Sunta and the Okavango, if the fever would let us. We made a good trek of it across the ‘thirst’—there had been very late rains that year—and even after crossing the Lake River we made good travelling well on towards the Mababi flat. We heard from the Makobas and Masarwas along the river that there was still some water standing in the bush on our right hand, that there were elephant in there, and that other game was abundant. It is not often that this veldt is accessible—from scarcity of water—and it seemed good enough to quit the wagon road for a time, and try the bush for ivory. Before reaching Scio Pans, therefore, we turned right-handed, and struck into the bush with one wagon—the other, in charge of our head driver, being sent on to the water, there to await our coming.

“We had some Masarwa bushmen with us, and they were as keen as hawks at the prospect of showing us heavy game, and getting a liberal supply of flesh. Northward we trekked steadily through wild desolate country for the best part of one day, and outspanned by a desert pool for the night. Here we were greatly disappointed to find no spoor of elephant, although giraffe, ostrich, gemsbok, and hartebeest were fairly plentiful. Next day at dawn we again pushed doggedly on, Angus and I taking different directions, and riding some miles ahead of the wagon on the look-out for elephant-spoor. I rode behind a Masarwa at a steady pace all morning without finding the least sign of the game we wanted, and, after an off-saddle at midday, once more pushed on in a north-westerly direction.

“Rather suddenly we came upon a klompje of giraffe, and as the elephants seemed very much in the air and we wanted meat, I rammed the spurs in and galloped headlong for the kameels (Camels. The Boer term for giraffe). It was desperately hot, and we were shut up in thick thorny bush in which not a breath of wind stirred, and I consequently had not got my coat on. The beast I rode for, a fat, fresh young cow, led me a pretty dance of two miles, hell for leather, at a terrific pace through the very thorniest jungle she could pick; and although I presently ranged close up to her rump, and with my third bullet (firing from my horse) brought her down with a crash, she had taken pretty heavy toll of me. My flannel shirt was torn to ribbons, and my chest and shoulders were rarely gashed about. Never hunt ‘camel’, gentlemen, in thick bush, without a stout coat on; that’s the advice of an old veldt-man, and it’s worth remembering. I ought to have known better that day, but I was not prepared for game at that particular moment.

“Well, I stuck my knife into the cow’s back and found her well covered with fat, and the Masarwa coming up soon after, we set to work to skin and cut her up. Presently, having fastened about twenty pounds of meat to my saddle, and carrying the long, prehensile tongue dangling far below my belt, I saddled up, leaving the Masarwa, who had a calabash of water, to finish the job and wait for the wagon to pick him up next morning.

“I myself took a sweep north-north-east, with the intention of working round to the wagon before sundown.

“I had not left the Masarwa half an hour, when I suddenly, to my intense surprise, cut the spoor of a wagon running pretty well east and west, and going westward. It was not fresh, but at the same time not very old either. It might have been a month or two old at most. ‘Now,’ thought I, ‘what in the mischief does this mean?’ Very few hunters use this veldt. I knew Khama had sent no wagons that way this season, and the only white man in front of us this year was Dirk Starreberg, one of the few Dutch hunters to whom Khama gave permission to hunt in his veldt. Starreberg’s wagon it could only be. And yet it struck me as strange that Dirk, whom I knew well—for he was a noted interior hunter—should be trekking in this veldt. He was, I knew, bound for the Victoria Falls. Probably, like ourselves, enticed by the unwonted water supply and the possibility of a slap at the elephants, he had turned off somewhere between Nata River and Daka, and pushed across for the Chobé. Thus reasoning, I turned my horse’s head, and, with the westering sun now on my right flank, struck homeward for the wagon. I rode on for half a mile, and then came another strange thing. As I crossed an open glade I saw coming towards me the figure of a man. I knew in a moment who it was. The slouching walk, the big, burly form, the vast red beard, the rifle carried—as Dirk always carried his—by the muzzle end, with the stock poised behind his shoulder—it was none but Dirk Starreberg himself. But there was something amiss with him. He looked worn and troubled, almost distraught, it seemed to me, at that distance; and he gazed neither to right nor left of him, but passed hurriedly and very swiftly in front of me at a distance of about eighty paces.

“‘Hallo! Dirk!’ I shouted. ‘Allemaghte! war loup jij? Wacht een bitje, Dirk!’ (Almighty! where are you off to? Wait a little, Dirk!) To my utter astonishment, the man took not the slightest notice, but passed on. I became indignant, and yelled, ‘Dirk, Dirk, have you no manners? It’s me, George Kenstone. I want you. Stop!’ Still the man passed on. In another moment he had reached the bush again. He turned now, beckoned to me with his right hand, and, in another instant, had disappeared into the low forest.

“I was extremely annoyed, and after staring like a fool for a second or two, struck in spurs rather sharply and galloped after him. I was not three seconds in reaching the bush where he had entered, but, to my surprise, Dirk had vanished. I searched hither and thither, shouted—ay, swore—but still no Dirk. I came back, at length, to the point where I had last seen the Boer. Surprise Number 3. There was my own spoor as plain as a pikestaff in the red sand, but of Dirk Starreberg not one trace of spoor was to be seen!

“Now, spoor, as you all know, is a thing that never lies. I had seen Dirk cross the clearing and enter the bush at this point. Where were his tracks? I got off my horse and hunted carefully every bit of the way across the glade where I had seen Dirk pass. I am a reasonable good veldt-man, but—so help me God!—I never could find one trace of the man’s spoor, this way or that. I rubbed my eyes. It was incomprehensible. I searched again and again, carefully and methodically, with the same result. There was always my own and my horse’s spoor, but no one else’s.

“By this time I was not a little bothered. There must be some infernal mystery which I could not fathom. My eyesight had never yet failed me. It was broad daylight, and I was neither asleep, nor dreaming, nor drunk. An old childish superstition crept for an instant upon my mind, to be instantly cast aside. And yet the flesh, even of grown manhood, is weak. I remember distinctly that I shivered, blazing hot as was the afternoon. The bush seemed very still and lonely, and I am bound to say it suddenly struck me it was time to move for the wagon. I got on to my good nag, walked him away, and presently set him into a brisk canter, which I only once slackened till I made the camp, just at sundown, a couple of hours later.

“I told Angus what I had seen. He laughed, and told me I had evidently missed the spoor, although he admitted that it was strange that Dirk had made no sign when I hailed him; and next morning we moved on rapidly, picked up the meat of the dead giraffe, and then a little later struck the wagon-spoor I had found yesterday. This we followed briskly until four o’clock p.m., when we came upon an old outspan, and discovery Number 4.

“Here was a good-sized water-pit in limestone formation. There were the remains of the camp-fire; and it was evident, from several indications, that the wagon, whosever it was, had stood at least two days at this spot. The camel-thorn trees (Giraffe-acacias) grew pretty thickly all around, and there was a good deal of bush, and altogether it was a sequestered, silent spot. Lying by the largest of the dead fires was an object that instantly quickened our interest in the mystery we were unravelling—the skeleton of a man, clean-picked by the foul vultures, but apparently untouched by jackals or hyaenas. There were still the tattered remains of clothing upon it, and one velschoen—a Boer velschoen—upon the right foot. I turned over the poor bleached framework to try and discover some inkling of its end. As I did so, out pattered from the skull on to the sand a solid Martini-Henry bullet, slightly flattened on one side of its apex, manifestly from impact with some bone it had encountered—probably a cheek-bone. A closer scrutiny revealed a big hole in rear of the skull just behind the right ear.

“‘By George!’ exclaimed Angus, who was bending over me, ‘there’s been foul play here. That shot was fired at pretty close quarters.’

“I nodded, and at that instant my Masarwa, who had been searching about near us, picked up and brought me a bunch of long red hair.

“‘So help me God!’ I could not help exclaiming, ‘that’s from Dirk Starreberg’s beard, for any money! He has been murdered here—that’s certain. If it was an accident, they would have buried him. The question is, who is the murderer?’

“We hunted about, but found no more traces, except the other velschoen and the remains of a Dutchman’s broad-brimmed hat. We outspanned for the night, and sat down to think it over and have a pipe while supper was being got ready.

“‘Angus,’ I said, ‘I don’t half like things. There’s some dark riddle here. The figure I saw yesterday afternoon was Dirk Starreberg’s. I knew him well, and never could mistake him. And, strangely enough, he was heading, when I last saw him, for this very spot. If I believed in ghosts, which I don’t, I should say I had seen Dirk’s spook. What do you make of it all? I’m beginning to think I’m dreaming, or going dotty. It beats me altogether.’

“‘Well,’ returned Angus, in his quaint way, ‘it’s the most extraordinary rum go I ever heard of. We’d better trek on in the morning, first thing, and see what else we can discover. Those are Dirk’s bones undoubtedly; we must try and do something for the poor chap, though he is dead.’

“I don’t know what was wrong that night, but several times the oxen were startled, and sprang to their feet; and the nags—fastened up to the wagon-wheels—were desperately scared once or twice, and pulled at their riems as though they must break them; the dogs, too, barked and howled, and behaved very strangely. And yet no lions were near us. Once or twice we looked out, but saw nothing. All of us, masters and boys, were uncomfortable—we could hardly explain why, and the men undoubtedly knew nothing of what I had seen the day before.

“At dawn next morning we were not sorry to inspan and trek; and, following the old wagon-spoor, we pushed on, determined if possible to get to the bottom of the affair. All that day and all the next we toiled on, only outspanning once or twice during the daytime, and at night, by water, to rest and refresh the oxen for a few hours. At last, an hour before sunset of the second day, Angus and I, who were riding ahead of the wagon, spied suddenly among some camel-thorn trees the tent of a wagon, to which we cantered. Suddenly, as we reined up, the fore-clap was cast aside, and a wild figure of a woman appeared, and scrambled down from the wagon-box. It was Vrouw Starreberg, but terribly, sadly altered from the stout, if somewhat grim, good-wife I had last seen a couple of years before. Her dark stuff dress was torn and cut about by the thorn-bushes; her erst fat, smooth face, broad though it still was, was lined and haggard, and terribly fallen away; but, above all, there was a rolling vacancy, a wildness, in her eye, that made me fear at once for her reason. Under one arm she clasped tightly a big Bible, and never in the subsequent days that we were together did she once relinquish it. It seemed that some terrible calamity had overturned her reason.

“‘Whence come ye, George Kenstone?’ (she had known me well for years), she cried in a harsh, high-pitched scream, very painful to listen to. ‘Take me out of this desert, and back to my home. I have been cast away these six weeks able to move neither hand nor foot for freedom. The man I called husband is dead, and my servants have fled, and the oxen are gone—the Lord knows where.’

“I scarce knew how to begin with her.

“‘I’m sorry, Tant’ Starreberg,’ I said, ‘to find you in this plight. I’m afraid there has been sad mischief, and your husband has been shot. Is it not so? We will help you gladly, of course, and early in the morning, when the oxen will be rested, we will take you out of this place. I fear you have suffered much. But how came poor Dirk by his end? Was it the boys?’

“At the mention of Dirk her whole expression changed; her eyes filled with a terrible light. In her best days Vrouw Starreberg was a hard-featured, ugly woman. Now she looked almost fiendish.

“‘Poor Dirk?’ she shrieked with a horrible scorn. ‘Poor Dirk? No, I am not afraid to own it! The man you call Dirk Starreberg—he was no more husband of mine—died by my hand. I shot him; yes, dead I shot him, as he sat by his fire. And why? Because he lied and was unfaithful. Because he forsook me for that mop-headed, blue-eyed, pink-faced doll—Alletta Veeland. And when at last I had discovered all—he talked over-much in his sleep, the traitor!—and taxed him with it, here in this very veldt, he laughed me to scorn, and told me he was tired of my black face and my sour ways, and gloried in his evil love. Ja! he taunted me that I was old and barren—I that had made a man of him, and brought him gold, and flocks, and herds, and set him up. And so I shot him, as I say. I could endure it no longer; and the servants, having trekked to this place with me, fled, and the oxen wandered, and I am alone, the Lord help me!’ At the next instant the poor, overwrought creature fell in a swoon upon the sand.

“Well, it was all very horrible; although even now we hardly knew what to believe. But we brought her to, gave her some brandy, and put her into her wagon to rest. And later on I took her some soup and bread, and made her eat it. She was exhausted now, and told me in a low voice that she had lived on meal and water for weeks past. Presently we turned in, and all was quiet.

“It was, I suppose, some little time after midnight that Angus and I were roused by a loud voice beyond the camp-fire, which lay between the other wagon and our own. We listened; it was the vrouw herself. Hastily we got down from the kartel and went towards her. She was beyond the fire, and her figure was well-nigh lost in the gloom of night. We could just see her white kopje, and an arm waving frantically. It was a terrible and uncanny scene. There stood the woman, screaming in wild and excited tones at something beyond—what we could not see, and shivered even to imagine. ‘Yes,’ she cried, ‘you come here to frighten me, Dirk Starreberg. I feared you not in life; I fear you not in death. I slew you, and I would slay you again. But I know why you walk thus through the veldt, and come seeking to drive me mad, night after night. To-morrow—now that I can trek—I will come and bury your bones, and you may rest quiet if you can. Trouble me no more, I say—begone!’

“Angus and I could stand it no longer, sick with horror though we were.

“‘Come back to your wagon, Vrouw Starreberg,’ I called out ‘You are dreaming. Go to rest again!’

“Still glaring in front of her, the woman stepped back till she had met our advance. I am bound to say that I looked, and Angus looked, with terrified eyes, but saw nothing of what she saw or thought she saw. We took the poor mad creature’s arms. She was trembling and wet—literally bathed in perspiration. What the tension must have been if this sort of thing had been going on sight after night, I shuddered even to think of. We took her to her wagon and gave her a strong dose of brandy and water, and presently she fell into heavy sleep. Then Angus and I got down our karosses, rekindled a roaring fire, and sat smoking by the blaze for the rest of that sight. Scared as I was, I believe I dozed once or twice, and Angus always swears, to this day, that he once saw the figure of Dirk Starreberg pass within the firelight fifty yards away. He woke me, but it had gone. The cattle were uneasy and disturbed again, and our Kaffirs, who had heard the vrouw talking, as they said, at a spook, lay huddled together under our wagon. It was uncanny, devilish uncanny, I can tell you, that intangible horror about the camp.

“Well, the rest of my story is short. Vrouw Starreberg was moving before dawn, and insisted that we must trek back to the old camp and bury the skeleton. We—fearing more horrors—said it could not be done, and that we should at once quit the bush and strike directly for the road. She then utterly refused to leave her wagon unless we did as she asked. We seriously thought of taking her by force, but she was a strong, powerful woman, her mind was already unhinged, and we feared the consequences of a struggle. And so, very reluctantly, we agreed to humour her and give her her wish. It was a ghastly business; we only prayed to get it quickly over.

“At earliest streak of daylight we were in-spanned, and all day travelled steadily back towards the scene of Dirk’s tragical ending. That night, strange to say, nothing happened to disturb us; everything passed quietly. We trekked again all next day, and halted for the night some three miles short of ‘the skeleton outspan,’ as we called it. Our reason for this was that we hoped the burial might be quietly accomplished in the bright sunshine of next morning, and the woman got well away, before nightfall, on the homeward journey. Vrouw Starreberg, I noticed, was restless and excited, but she made no objection. Again, I noticed that she still carried her Bible tightly clasped under the left arm. The vrouw lay in our wagon; Angus and I sleeping by the fire again. We were dog-tired, and slept soundly until roused, just as daylight broke, by our wagon-driver, a Griqua named Albrecht. The man was looking very strangely. ‘Baas,’ he said, ‘the vrouw is not there,’ (pointing to the wagon); ‘she went in the night. I heard her whispering, and I looked from where I was lying, and there she was, beyond the firelight, following a man—a Dutchman, I think—or a spook, I don’t know which, towards the murderer’s outspan (de mordenaar’s outspan to). I was frightened, Baas, and I dared not move. There is her spoor; but the man’s spoor I cannot see.’

“We sprang to our feet and went straight to the wagon; the fore-clap was pulled aside; the kartel was empty. Yes, she had gone; and our hearts were sick with a nameless fear. Taking Albrecht with us, we saddled up at once, and spoored the vrouw along the track towards the old outspan. And there, surely enough, we found her, stone-dead by the side of the skeleton.

“There was no mark upon her, but in her face was the most awful look of horror and of fright that I ever saw upon the countenance of the dead. I believe she had died of sheer terror, and of nothing else. What had happened in those silent, terrible night hours—by what ghastly agency she had been dragged to the scene of the tragedy; how the end had actually come, God only knows.

“We were but too anxious to get away from this dreadful place after such events. We buried the body and skeleton together, and trekked out as fast as the oxen could travel, never stopping till we had struck the road and reached Scio Pans.

“That, gentlemen, is my solitary experience of spooks. I never want to have another. I was a scoffer before; I am a believer now. And if you told me that in the bush I speak of there were now standing ready for me, as a free gift, two buck-wagons loaded up with ivory—why, I should decline the offer.

“Never would I be induced to enter that veldt again!”

Chapter Four.

The Professor’s Butterfly.

Quite the most remarkable feature of an April meeting of the Entomological Society in 1880 something was the production, by Professor Parchell, F.Z.S., F.L.S., one of the oldest and most enthusiastic members of the Society, of a new and remarkable species of Achraea hitherto quite unknown to science. The Professor was radiant and suffused with happiness. He had long been an ardent collector in England and Europe; but only recently had he turned his footsteps to the far-off lands south of the equator. It had been the dream of his life. And now, having lately resigned his chair at Cambridge, at the age of sixty, at his first essay in Cape Colony, a region fairly well-known to entomologists, he had gratified his heart’s desire, and discovered a species.

The new butterfly, which, it appeared, from a paper read by the Professor, had been found in some numbers, but within a very limited area—a mere speck of country—was shown in a carefully constructed case. There were sixteen specimens; and it was settled that the butterfly was to be known to science as Achraea Parchelli, thus perpetuating the Professor and his discovery to the ages yet unborn. The one particularity which marked the insect out from among its fellows was very striking. Upon the upper side of the hind-wings, right in the centre, there appeared a complete triangular space of silver, evenly bordered by circular black markings. This peculiarity, which was shared by male and female alike, was very beautiful and very marked; and the enthusiastic collectors gathered at the Society’s meeting were, as the box of specimens was passed from hand to hand, all delighted with the new treasure. As for the Professor himself, never, except perhaps in that supreme moment when he had discovered within his net this new wonder, had he experienced such a glow of rapture and of triumph.

Amongst the Fellows of the Society met this evening sat Horace Maybold, a good-looking young man of six-and-twenty, who, having some private means, and an unquenchable thirst for the collection of butterflies, spent most of his time in going to and fro upon the earth in search of rare specie, Horace had travelled in many lands, and had made a good many discoveries well-known to his brethren; and quite recently he had turned his attention to the Achraeinae, the very family in which Professor Parchell had made his mark. The new butterfly interested him a good deal. Naturally he at once burned to possess it in his own collection, and, after the meeting broke up, he approached the Professor and sounded him on the subject. In his paper read to the Society that gentleman had rather vaguely, described the habitat of the new species as “in the Eastern Province of Cape Colony, in a small and compact area within fifty miles of the east bank of the Sunday’s River.” But it appeared very quickly that the Professor for the present was unwilling to part with any of his specimens—even for an adequate consideration—or to impart the exact locality in which the species was to be found.

Horace had rather reckoned upon this, but he was none the less a little chagrined at the old gentleman’s closeness.

“No, my dear sir,” had replied the Professor to his inquiries, “I can’t part with any of my specimens, except to the Natural History Museum, to which I intend to present a pair. As for the precise habitat, I intend—ahem!—for the present to reserve that secret to myself. It is a pardonable piece of selfishness—or shall I term it self-preservation?—you, as a collector, must admit I intend to renew my acquaintance with the spot towards the beginning of next winter—that is the summer of the Cape. When I have collected more specimens, I may publish my secret to the world—hardly before.”

Horace looked keenly at the face of the clean, pink and white old gentleman before him. There was no compromise in the set of the firm lips, or the blue eyes beaming pleasantly from behind the gold-rimmed spectacles; and so, with a polite sentence or two on his lips, but with some vexation at his heart, Horace Maybold turned away and went down to his club.

During the rest of that summer Horace was pretty much occupied, yet his memory never relaxed its grip of the Professor and his new butterfly. He had upon his writing-table the coloured plate from a scientific magazine, whereon was depicted that rare species; and as he refreshed his memory with it now and again, he determined more than ever to possess himself of specimens of the original. As far as possible he kept a sharp eye on the Professor’s movements until the middle of September, when, happening to return to town from a few days’ shooting, he ran across the old gentleman in Piccadilly.

“Well, Professor,” said Horace, genially, “how goes the world with you? I suppose you will be leaving England for the Cape again presently?”

“Yes,” returned the old gentleman, who seemed in excellent spirits; “I expect to be sailing early in October. I want to have a fortnight or more in Cape Town at the Museum there. After that I propose proceeding to my old hunting-ground of last year.”

“Where you discovered the new Achraea?” interposed Horace.

“Exactly,” rejoined the old gentleman.

“I quite envy you, Professor,” went on Horace. “I am in two minds about visiting South Africa myself this winter. The Orange River country hasn’t been half ransacked yet, or Kaffraria either, for that matter. I haven’t settled my plans; but I may have a turn at one or the other.”

Now Kaffraria lies not very far to the east of the Professor’s own collecting-ground, that sacred spot which held his great secret yet inviolate. The old gentleman’s face changed perceptibly; a stiffer line or two appeared about his mouth; he looked with some suspicion into Horace’s eyes, and said, rather shortly: “Ah, well! I am told the Orange River is an excellent and untried region. But, entomologically, South Africa upon the whole is poor. My visits there are mainly for health and change. But I must be getting on; I have much to do. Good-bye, Mr Maybold—good-bye!”

The Professor passed on down St James’s Street, and Horace sauntered along Piccadilly with a smile upon his face. The old gentleman had imparted something of his movements. Should he follow them up? Yes; he must have that Achraea Parchelli somehow. He would follow to the Eastern Province in November. It might be a trifle like poaching; but, after all, the world is not a butterfly preserve for the one or two lucky ones. It lies open to every entomologist. And the old man had been so confoundedly close and secret. It would serve him right to discover his sacred treasure and make plain his mystery.

After watching the weekly passenger list in South Africa for some time; Horace Maybold noted with interest that Professor Parchell had sailed for Cape Town by a Donald Currie steamer in the first week of October. That fact ascertained, he at once secured a berth in a deck cabin of the Norham Castle for the first week in November. The chase had begun, and already Horace felt a keen and amusing sense of adventure—adventure in little—springing within him.

After Madeira, when all had found their sea-legs, and the warm weather and smooth ocean appeared, things became very pleasant. Horace was not a man who quickly became intimate or much attached to people; but, almost insensibly, upon this voyage he found himself developing a strong friendship, almost an intimacy, with two ladies: one, Mrs Stacer, a pleasant, comely, middle-aged woman, perhaps nearer fifty than forty; the other, Miss Vanning, young, good-looking, and extremely attractive. The two ladies, who were connected, if not relations, were travelling to Port Elizabeth to stay with friends in that part of the colony—where, exactly, was never quite made clear. Horace found them refined, well-bred, charming women, having many things in common with him; and the trio in a day or two’s time got on swimmingly together.

By the time the line was reached, the vision of Rose Vanning, with her fair, wavy brown hair, good grey eyes, fresh complexion, and open, yet slightly restrained manner, was for ever before the mental ken of Horace May bold. Here, indeed, he told himself, was the typical English girl he had so often set before his mind; fresh, tallish, full of health, alert, vigorous in mind and body, yet a thorough and a perfect woman. On many a warm tropical evening, as they sat together on deck, while the big ship drove her way through the oil-like ocean, sending shoals of flying-fish scudding to right and left of her, the two chatted together, and day by day their intimacy quickened. It was clear to Horace, and it began, too, to dawn upon Mrs Stacer, that Rose Vanning found a more than ordinary pleasure in his presence. By the time they were within a day of Cape Town, Horace had more than half made up his mind. He had gently opened the trenches with Mrs Stacer, who had met him almost half-way, and had obtained permission to call upon them in London—at a house north of Hyde Park, where they were living. At present they knew so little of him and his people, that he felt it would be unfair to push matters further. But he had mentioned Mrs Stacer’s invitation to Rose Vanning.

“I hope, Miss Vanning,” he said, “you won’t quite have forgotten me when I come to see you—let me see—about next May. It’s a very long way off, isn’t it? And people and things change so quickly in these times.” He looked a little anxiously at the girl as he spoke; what he saw reassured him a good deal.

“If you haven’t forgotten us, Mr Maybold,” she said, a pretty flush rising as she spoke, “I’m quite sure we shall remember and be glad to see you. We’ve had such good times together, and I hope you’ll come and see us soon. We shall be home in April at latest, and we shall have, no doubt, heaps of adventures to compare.”

At Cape Town, Horace, after many inquiries, had half settled upon a journey along the Orange River. He had more than one reason for this. Perhaps Rose Vanning’s influence had sharpened his moral sense; who knows? At any rate, he had begun to think it was playing it rather low down upon the Professor, to follow him up and poach his preserves. He could do the Orange River this season, and wait another year for the Achraea Parchelli; by that time the old gentleman would probably have had his fill, and would not mind imparting the secret, if properly approached. And so the Orange River was decided upon, and in three or four days he was to start.

Upon the following evening, however, something happened to alter these plans. Half an hour before dinner, as he was sitting on the pleasant stoep (veranda) of the International Hotel, enjoying a cigarette, a man whose face he seemed to know came up to him and instantly claimed acquaintance. “You remember me, surely, Maybold?” he said. “I was at Marlborough with you—in the same form for three terms.”

Of course Horace remembered him; and they sat at dinner together and had a long yarn far into the night.

The upshot of this meeting was that nothing would satisfy John Marley—“Johnny,” he was always called—but Horace should go round by sea with him to Port Elizabeth, and stop a few weeks at his farm, some little way up-country from that place. When he was tired of that, he could go on by rail from Cradock, and complete his programme on the Orange River.

“If you want butterflies, my boy,” said Johnny in his hearty way, “you shall have lots at my place—tons of them after the rains; and we’ll have some rattling good shooting as well. You can’t be always running about after ‘bugs,’ you know.”

So, next day but one, Horace, little loth, was haled by his friend down to the docks again, and thence round to Port Elizabeth by steamer. From Port Elizabeth they proceeded, partly by rail partly by Cape cart and horses, in a north-easterly direction, until at length, after the best part of a day’s journey through some wild and most beautiful scenery, they drove up late in the evening to a long, low, comfortable farmhouse, shaded by a big verandah, where they were met and welcomed by Marley’s wife and three sturdy children. After allowing his friend a day’s rest, to unpack his kit and get out his gunnery and collecting-boxes, Johnny plunged him into a vortex of sport and hard work. A fortnight had vanished ere Horace could cry off. He had enjoyed it all immensely; but he really must get on with the butterflies, especially if he meant to go north to the Orange River.

Marley pretended to grumble a little at his friend’s desertion of buck-shooting for butterfly-collecting; but he quickly placed at his disposal a sharp Hottentot boy, Jacobus by name, who knew every nook and corner of that vast countryside, and, barring a little laziness, natural to Hottentot blood, proved a perfect treasure to the entomologist. The weather was perfection. Some fine showers had fallen, vegetation had suddenly started into life, and the flowers were everywhere ablaze. The bush was in its glory.

Amid all this regeneration of nature, butterflies and insects were extremely abundant. Horace had a great time of it, and day after day added largely to his collection. One morning, flitting about here and there, he noticed a butterfly that seemed new to him. He quickly had a specimen within his net, and, to his intense satisfaction, found it as he had suspected, a new species. It belonged to the genus Eurema, which contains but few species, and somewhat resembled Eurema schaeneia (Trimen), a handsome dark-brown and yellow butterfly, with tailed hind-wings. But Horace’s new capture was widely different, in this respect: the whole of the under surface of the wings was suffused with a strong roseate pink, which mingled here and there with the brown, sometimes darker, sometimes lighter in its hue.

Here was a thrilling discovery—a discovery which, as Horace laughingly said to himself, would make old Parchell “sit up” at their Society’s meeting next spring. Horace captured eight more specimens—the butterfly was not too plentiful—and then made for home in an ecstasy of delight.

A few days after this memorable event he set off with Jacobus for a farmhouse thirty miles away, to the owner of which—an English Afrikander—Marley had given him an introduction. As they passed near the kloof where the new butterfly had been discovered, which lay about half-way, Horace off-saddled for an hour, and picked up half a dozen more specimens of the new Eurema. These he placed with the utmost care in his collecting-box. At noon they saddled up and rode on again. Towards three o’clock they emerged from the hills upon a shallow, open, grassy valley, girt about by bush and mountain scenery. This small valley was ablaze with flowers, and butterflies were very abundant. Getting Jacobus to lead his horse quietly after him, Horace wandered hither and thither among the grass and flowers, every now and again sweeping up some butterfly that took his fancy. Suddenly, as he opened his net to secure a new capture, he uttered an exclamation of intense surprise. “By all that’s entomological!” he cried, looking up with a comical expression at the stolid and uninterested Hottentot boy, “I’ve done it, I’ve done it! I’ve hit upon the old Professor’s new butterfly!”

No man could well be more pleased with himself than Horace Maybold at that moment. In ten minutes he had within his box seven or eight more specimens, for the butterfly—the wonderful, the undiscoverable Achraea Parchelli—seemed to be fairly plentiful.

“How far are we off Mr Gunton’s place now, Jacobus?” asked Horace.

“Nie, vär, nie, Baas,” (Not so far, master), replied the boy in his Dutch patois. “’Bout one mile, I tink. See, dar kom another Baas!”

Horace shaded his eyes and looked. About one hundred and fifty yards off there appeared above the tall grass a curious figure, remarkable for a huge white helmet, loose light coat, and pink face and blue spectacles. A green butterfly net was borne upon the figure’s shoulder. Horace knew in a moment whose was that quaint figure. He gave a soft whistle to himself. It was the Professor.

The old gentleman came straight on, and, presently, seeing, within fifty yards, strange people before him, walked up. He stood face to face with Horace Maybold, amazed, aghast, and finally very angry.

“Good-morning, Professor,” said that young man. “I’m afraid I’ve stumbled by a sheer accident on your hunting-ground. I am staying with an old schoolfellow thirty miles away, and rode in this direction. I had no idea you were here.”

The Professor was a sight to behold. Red as an enraged turkey-cock, streaming with perspiration—for it was a hot afternoon—almost speechless with indignation, he at last blurted into tongue: “So, sir, this is what you have been doing—stealing a march upon me; following me up secretly; defrauding me of the prizes of my own labour and research. I could not have believed it of any member of the Society. The thing is more than unhandsome. It is monstrous! an utterly monstrous proceeding!”

Horace attempted to explain matters again. It was useless; he might as well have argued with a buffalo bull at that moment.

“Mr Maybold,” retorted the Professor, “the coincidence of your staying in the very locality in which my discovery was made, coupled with the fact that you endeavoured, at the last meeting of the Entomological Society, to extract from me the habitat of this new species, is quite too impossible. I have nothing more to say, for the present.” And the irate old gentleman passed on.

Horace felt excessively vexed. Yet he had done no wrong. Perhaps when the old gentleman had come to his senses he would listen to reason.

Jacobus now led the way to the farmhouse. It lay only a mile away, and they presently rode up towards the stoep. Two ladies were sitting under the shade of the ample thatched veranda—one was painting, the other reading. Horace could scarcely believe his eyes as he approached. These were his two fellow-passengers of the Norham Castle, Mrs Stacer and Rose Vanning, the latter looking, if possible, more charming than ever. The ladies recognised him in their turn, and rose with a little flutter. Horace jumped from his horse and shook hands with some warmth.

“Who on earth,” he said, “could have expected to meet you in these wilds? I am astonished—and delighted,” he added, with a glance at Rose.

Explanations ensued. It seemed that the ladies were the sister and step-daughter of the Professor, who was a widower. They had been engaged by him in a mild conspiracy not to reveal his whereabouts, so fearful was he of his precious butterfly’s habitat being made known to the world; and so, all through the voyage, no mention had been made even of his name. It was his particular whim and request, and here was the mystery at an end. The Professor had moved from the farmhouse in which he had lodged the year before, and had secured quarters in Mr Gunton’s roomy, comfortable ranch, where the ladies had joined him.

Horace, who had inwardly chafed at this unexpected turn, had now to explain his awkward rencontre with the Professor. To his great relief, Mrs Stacer and Rose took it much more philosophically than he could have hoped; indeed, they seemed rather amused than otherwise.

“But,” said Horace with a rueful face, “the Professor’s in a frantic rage with me. You don’t quite realise that he absolutely discredits my story, and believes I have been playing the spy all along. And upon the top of all this I have a letter to Mr Gunton, and must sleep here somehow for the night. There’s no other accommodation within twenty miles. Why, when the Professor comes back and finds me here, he’ll go out of his mind!”

Here Mrs Stacer, good woman that she was, volunteered to put matters straight, for the night at all events. She at once saw Mr Gunton, and explained the impasse to him; and Horace was comfortably installed, away from the Professor’s room, in the farmer’s own quarters.

“Leave my brother to me,” said Mrs Stacer, as she left Horace. “I daresay matters will come right.”

At ten o’clock Mrs Stacer came to the door. Mr Gunton rose and went out as she entered. “H’sh!” she said with mock-mystery as she addressed Horace. “I think,” she went on, with a comical little smile, “the Professor begins to think he has done you an injustice. He is amazed at our knowing you, and we have attacked him all the evening, and he is visibly relenting.”

“Mrs Stacer,” said Horace warmly, “I can’t thank you sufficiently. I’ve had an inspiration since I saw you. I, too, have discovered, not far from here, a rather good new butterfly—a species hitherto unknown. Can’t I make amends, by sharing my discovery with the Professor? I’ve got specimens here in my box, and there are plenty in a kloof fifteen miles away.”

“Why, of course,” answered Mrs Stacer. “It’s the very thing. Your new butterfly will turn the scale I’ll go and tell my brother you have a matter of importance to communicate, and wish to make further explanations. Wait a moment.”

In three minutes she returned. “I think it will be all right,” she whispered. “Go and see him. Straight through the passage you will find a door open, on the right. I’ll wait here.”

Horace went forward and came to the half-open door. The Professor, who had changed his loose, yellow, alpaca coat for a black one of the same material, sat by a reading-lamp. He wore now his gold-rimmed spectacles, in lieu of the blue “goggles.” He looked clean, and pink, and comfortable, though a trifle severe—the passion of the afternoon had vanished from his face. Horace spoke the first word. “I have again to reiterate Professor, how vexed I am to have disturbed your collecting-ground. I had not the smallest intention of doing it. Indeed, my plans lay farther north. It was the pure accident of meeting my old school-friend, Marley, that led me here. In order to convince you of my sincere regret, I have here a new butterfly—evidently a scarce and unknown Eurema—which I discovered a few days since, near here. My discovery is at your service. Here is the butterfly. I trust you will consider it some slight set-off for the vexation I have unwittingly given you.”

At sight of the butterfly, which Horace took from his box, the Professor’s eyes gleamed with interest. He took the insect, looked at it very carefully, then returned it.

“Mr Maybold,” he said, rising and holding out his hand, “I believe I did you an injustice this afternoon. I lost my temper, and I regret it. I understand from my sister and daughter that they are acquainted with you, and that they were fully aware of your original intention to travel to the Orange River. Your offer of the new butterfly, which is, as you observe, a new and rare species, is very handsome, and I cry quits. I trust I may have the pleasure of seeing you to-morrow at breakfast, and accompanying you to the habitat of your very interesting and remarkable discovery.”

Before breakfast next morning there was a very pleasant and even tender meeting between Horace Maybold and Rose Vanning; and, when Mrs Stacer joined them, there was a merry laugh over the adventures of yesterday.

After breakfast—they all sat down together, the Professor in his most genial mood—Horace and the old gentleman at once set off for the kloof where the new Eurema was discovered. They returned late in the evening; the Professor had captured a number of specimens, and although fatigued, was triumphantly happy. Horace stayed a week with them after this, with the natural result that at the end of that time he and Rose Vanning were engaged, with the Professor’s entire consent. The new butterfly—which, partly out of compliment to Rose, partly from its own peculiar colouring, was unanimously christened Eurema Rosa—was exhibited by Horace and the Professor jointly and with great éclat at an early meeting of the Entomological Society.

Horace and Rose’s marriage is a very happy one. And, as they both laughingly agree—for the old gentleman often reminds them of the fact—they may thank the Professor’s butterfly (the famous Achraea Parchelli) for the lucky chance that first threw them together.

Chapter Five.

A Boer Pastoral.

It is dim early morning, and upon the vast plains of Great Bushmanland, in the far north-west of Cape Colony, the air blows fresh and chill, though the land is Africa, and the time summer. At 4:15 precisely the bright morning star shoots above the horizon, and rises steadily upward in a straight, rocket-like ascent.

Now a ruddy colouring tinges the pale grey of the eastern sky, to be followed by broad rays in delicate blues and greens that strike boldly for the zenith. The changes of dawn in Africa are swift and very subtle. Presently these colours fade, and a pale, subdued light rests upon the earth; the air is full of a clear but cold brightness. Soon follows the full red-orange, that so gorgeously paints the eastern horizon, and closely foreruns the sun; and then suddenly the huge burning disc itself is thrust upon the sky-line, and it is, in South African parlance, “sun up.”

The plains here stretch in illimitable expanse to the horizon. Far to the west is a range of mountain, forty good miles away, which, in the clear morning air, stands out as sharply as if but a dozen miles distant. You may see the dark lines and patches of the time-worn seams and krantzes that scar its sides. This translucency of atmosphere is very common in Southern Africa.

The rains have lately fallen, and everywhere around the dry plains have started at the breath of moisture into a splendid, if short-lived, beauty. Miles upon miles of flats, all glowing and ablaze with purple and a rich, flame-like red, are spread around. The wonderful Composites are in flower, and the barren, desert-like flats are for a few brief weeks transformed into a carpet of the noblest colouring and pattern. Look closely, and you may see the bleached and blackened limbs of former growths of low shrub, which stand amid the gallant blaze—gaunt reminders of the transitory existence of African flower life.

Near at hand lies a vlei, a shallow temporary lake recruited by the recent rains. At the end of this vlei, farthest removed from the group of wagons outspanned there, is gathered at this early hour a notable display of bird life. Duck, geese, widgeon, and teal are there, cackling and crying in a joyous plenty. Stints and sandpipers whirl hither and thither, and graceful black-and-white avocets, with their singular, upturned, slender bills, and long, red-legged stilt-plovers, haunt the shallows. Upon the plain some small birds have been afoot some time. You may see and hear the lively, inquisitive Jan Fredric thrush, with his pleasing song, and his curious note—“Jan-fredric-dric-dric-fredric.” He is racing swiftly hither and thither through the shrub and flowers, bustling for his food supply. There, too, are the thick-billed lark, the Sabota lark, with its clear, ringing call, and a few other—but not many—small birds. Aloft an eagle is already on the move, and a hawk or two, no doubt meditating descent upon some of the wildfowl on the vlei. Out upon the plains, half a mile distant from the wagons, are to be seen a knot or two of graceful springbok busily feeding in the choice herbage. But now there is a stir at the wagons yonder. For half an hour past “Ruyter,” a little wizened Hottentot, has been busy blowing up the embers of the half-dead fire, and making coffee for the baas and meisje.

From the biggest of the wagons descends a vast, uncouth figure—that of Klaas Stuurmann, the Trek-Boer. Almost at the same moment the achter-klap (flap) at the hinder part of the wagon is thrown back, and the figure of a young woman, rather dishevelled—for, like her father, she has been manifestly sleeping in her day-clothes (night-clothes they have none)—descends. The two approach the fire, greet one another in stolid, almost mute fashion—the father kissing impassively the girl’s proffered cheek—and then, standing, they drink the coffee handed to them by the little Hottentot man, and eat a few mouthfuls of bread. Watch them well, these two figures; they are the representatives of a type slowly disappearing from the Cape Colony—the race of Trek-Boers, nomads, who for generations have had no home but their wagons, and who live (more often than not from absolute choice) the free vagrant life of the veldt, with their flocks and herds around them.

The man, Klaas Stuurmann, is a Boer of loose, ungainly frame. He stands six feet one; is about fifty-two years of age; has a broad, deeply tanned face, in which are planted two watery-blue eyes; a shock of hay-coloured hair; and a long beard of the same uninteresting hue. He wears veldt-broeks (field-trousers) of soft home-tanned skin. He is about the last Dutchman in Cape Colony to use these old-world garments; but his father and grandfather wore such clothes, and they are good enough for him. He has no socks or stockings, and a pair of rude, home-made, hide velschoens cover his feet. He has a flannel shirt to his back, and over that a short jacket of much-worn corduroy. Upon his head is the usual tall-crowned, broad-brimmed, felt hat, which carries a hideous band of broad, rusty crape in memory of his deceased wife. The man’s face is dirty, to be sure; but, besides the dirt, there is a dull, vacant, unthinking look, rather painful to see. It is the look of one bred through dull, listless generations of men, self-banished from their own kind, whose only interests have been in sheep and goats and trek oxen, their only excitement an occasional hunt, or a scrimmage with Bushmen in time gone by. Such a listless and vacant look you may see even now in some of the more remote dals of Norway, among the poorer of the peasant-farmer folk. It is the look of men who gaze always without a spark of interest upon the silent face of nature around them, and who for generations have seldom exchanged an idea with their fellows.

For 150 years Klaas Stuurmann and his ancestors have led the wandering life of the Trek-Boer, knowing no hearth but the pleasant camp-fire, no roof but the glaring blue of the unchanging African sky and the tents of their wagons, no floor but the wild veldt. Many among the more settled Dutch farmers wonder how these uneasy nomads, with their shiftless ways and habits of unrest, first came to pursue such an existence. In the present instance it happened much in this wise: Klaas Stuurmann’s great-great-grandfather, a restless spirit, farming near the old settlement at Cape Town, became, like many others, tired of the petty and exasperating restrictions of the then Batavian governor. And so he trekked in search of fresh pastures, beyond the reach of taxes and monopolies. He was a sportsman, and the land opening before him disclosed the most wonderful and redundant fauna the world has ever seen. Still carrying his flocks and family with him, the Boer wandered from veldt to veldt, always in a country virgin to the hunter, and teeming with the noblest game.

Year after year went by, his family grew up around him—how, he himself would have been puzzled to explain—and still the open-air, hand-to-mouth existence pleased him, the splendid liberty, and the free, unfettered chase in that vast, crowded, game preserve. At the beginning he sometimes cast his eye here and there in search of a farm, but somehow no plants suited him. He wandered ever farther in search of his ideal, and finally the veldt life had so bitten into him that he preferred to live and die in it. If he wanted powder and lead, some coffee and sugar, or a piece of stuff for his wife’s and daughters’ gowns, or a new roer (gun) for his growing lads, he had but to trek with a load of ivory and feathers to “Kaapstad” (Cape Town), and get what he desired. For the rest, the earth and her plenty sufficed to him. And so the years rolled on. The old Karel Stuurmann died, and was buried near a fountain on the wild karroo, and his sons and daughters became Trek-Boers, or the wives of Trek-Boers, after him. For many a year all went well: the game was still there to pursue; the land was lonely, yet pleasant; and the verdoemed uitlander (accursed foreigner) was as yet unknown. But presently came the British, and after them percussion-guns, and later the deadly breech-loader. The game began to vanish, the country became more settled, and, except for the remote wildernesses of the north-west, the Cape Colony was no longer the Trek-Boer’s paradise. Slavery was abolished, and even the native servants, the Hottentots and Kaffirs—nay, even the captive Bushboys, mere baboons the Boers called them, torn young from their slaughtered parents—could no longer be treated quite as of yore. Many of these Trek-Boers joined the emigrant farmers, and passed beyond the Orange and the Vaal Rivers. Some of them helped to found the Orange Free State and Transvaal Republics; some of them still pursued the old wandering life, and, as elephant-hunters, dared the unknown wilds and the dangers of the remote regions towards the Zambesi. But still a leaven of them clung to the old Cape Colony. The life became ever more sombre and less alluring. The great game had gone; only the springboks and smaller antelopes remained to remind them of the teeming plenty of the brave days of smooth-bores and flint-locks. These Trek-Boers of the colony sank lower in the social scale; they had to depend only on their scant flocks and herds; their more settled and richer neighbours learned to look upon them with dislike and even hate, for the reason that they often, by means of their flocks and herds, carried disease—scab and lung-sickness, and red-water—from one farm to another. And so in these latter days the Trek-Boer of the Cape Colony is looked upon as little better than the gipsy of Europe. Many of them are miserably poor; their flocks are reduced and deteriorated from disease and in-and-in breeding; their wagons are battered and dilapidated; they themselves look degraded and sunken and miserable. Some of them burn ashes from certain of the karroo bushes, and sell them to the settled farmers to make soap with. Some collect salt from the pans, and with a few springbok skins earn a trifle to eke out their wretchedness. Some few, like the Stuurmanns, still have decent wagons and fair flocks. But in the Cape Colony they are a declining race, and twenty or thirty years more will see the last of them. Yet even the poorest of them still retain their pure European blood, still lord it over their miserable native servants, and at times—perhaps thrice in the year—still trek to the nearest village for Nachtmaal (communion). And still the great Bible, more often than not two hundred years old, is carried in the wagon-chest and cherished. For these Trek-Boers of Cape Colony, the unpeopled solitudes of Bushmanland—that is, the northern portion of the divisions of Little Namaqualand, Calvinia, Fraserburg, and Carnarvon, bordering on the Orange River—are still a last stronghold. Here, after the rains, they can range freely with their flocks and pursue the trekking springboks, and live the old wild life. Elsewhere, if they halt for the night on the farm of another, they must pay for the privilege, and a goat or sheep or two have to be handed over in exchange for pasture and right of water.

I have hinted at the darker aspect of the latter-day life of the Trek-Boers of Cape Colony. Let us glance at the more pleasant part of it.

Their coffee finished, Klaas Stuurmann moves to the temporary kraals, a hundred yards away, where his flocks are confined for the night. There are two kraals—one for the sheep, one for goats—and they are simply made of bush and branches of the acacia and wait-a-bit thorns, fashioned into a light ring-fencing, just sufficient to keep the flocks within and prowling hyaenas and jackals without. Already the native herd-boys are there waiting for their charges; and the hungry kraal-denizens, knowing their breakfast-hour is nigh, bleat loudly for the near freedom of the veldt. The tall Dutchman now plants himself by the entrance of the sheep-kraal, from which a herdsman drags away the thorns. Forth flock the impatient sheep, and as their stream issues through the narrow exit, Klaas Stuurmann numbers them head by head. As a rule the Boer is a bad hand at figures; but in the necessary ancient custom of counting flocks night and morning, he can reckon with as much skill as any man. Practice makes perfect, and so Klaas Stuurmann finds no difficulty in taking his fleecy census, fast as the sheep pass forth.

The sheep—600 of them—are checked and found in order, and the same process is gone through at the other kraal, whence, to the number of 800, the goats go forth, in the ancient African fashion of five thousand years, to pasture in the wild. The warm air, full of the rich, aromatic scent of the veldt vegetation, now springing in its prime, comes alluringly into the nostrils of these nomadic flocks, and soon they are scattered upon the plain feeding vigorously, their silent, patient herd-boys tending them for the hot, livelong day.

What do these dusky herd-boys think of, day after day, as they follow their flocks? Heaven knows! As well ask the bird and beast of the great plains what are their thoughts! Sometimes in the days of the Pharaohs there sprang a great warrior or statesman from the brown-skinned herdsmen and hunters of the far Land of Cush; nay, Egypt herself was ruled not seldom during these remote ages by almost pure Ethiopian blood. But nowadays there be no black Hampdens, or yellow Miltons, still less, possible Pharaohs, from among the lazy Kaffirs and poor besotted Hottentots of the Cape Colony.

Refilling his pipe from colonial tobacco, carried loose in his jacket-pocket, and relighting it, the big Boer moves massively back to his wagon, near which his daughter is busily engaged in a wash at the welcome vlei. There are three other wagons outspanned by the pool: one of them belongs to the Boer’s two sons; one of them is inhabited by yet another Trek-Boer, whose vrouw is engaged in the same task of washing, and whose children—five of them—young, merry rascals, are playing in the strong sunlight upon the edge of the water.

Their voices sound pleasantly upon the sweet, warm air, and recall, even to Klaas Stuurmann’s unimpressive mind, the younger days of his own children and his now dead wife. The recollection brings an unwonted tenderness to his rugged soul, and as the noisy imps, busy at their games of wagon-and-oxen, play and clamour about him, he goes to his wagon, opens his sugar-bag, fills a kommetje (A small common earthenware basin, universally used by the Boers instead of a tea or coffee cup) with the dark-brown treacly stuff, and calls the tanned and ragged little company about him. Jan, Katrina, Hendrik, Gert, Jacobina, and the tiny, toddling Jacie, all receive their morsel of the sweet-stuff—not without some awe and wonderment, for the grim, burly Boer man seldom unbends so far.

The oxen are feeding quietly round the vlei; the Boer’s eye follows them with contentment, for water and the rich veldt have brought fat and sleekness to their great frames. His daughter’s toilet catches his eye, and he watches the girl with an air of grave and secret pleasure, for she is the last survivor of three girl children, and by no means an ill-looking maiden in a Dutchman’s eye. Ruyter, the Hottentot, has brought an iron bucket from the wagon, and at the margin of the vlei he fills it with water for the meisje, who already has soap, a towel, and a comb. Taking off her sun-bonnet, she washes her face and hands, then, unfettering her stout plait of fair brown hair, she leans forward, and using the calm surface of the water as a mirror, combs out the somewhat tangled locks. Again the brown hair is coiled into a neat plait, drawn tightly from her temples, and her toilet is complete. As she ties on her sun-bonnet again the Boer comes up, pats her broad back, and looks admiringly at the now refreshened face. Two hundred years of South Africa have little altered the old Batavian type. The eyes are blue, but of small brilliancy, the cheeks too broad and flat for English taste, and the young figure is already stiff, waistless, and heavy. Yet in this far-off back-country women folk are scarce, and in much request, and already, at eighteen, Anna Stuurmann has found a mate. Next to her brothers’ wagon there stands the wagon of her betrothed—Rodolf Klopper—who is just now away in the grass plains a little to the north, shooting springboks with the younger Stuurmanns. This wagon is newly repaired, smart, and gaily painted, and is destined in another month or two, after the flocks have been well recruited in the Bushmanland Trek-veldt, to become the home of the Boer maiden. The combined families are to trek to Calvinia village, where the marriage will take place, and thenceforth Anna becomes mistress of her own man and wagon.

His daughter’s modest toilet complete, the big Boer dips a corner of the not over-clean towel in water, runs it carelessly over brow, cheeks, eyes, and mouth, dips his hands, and the trick is done. The proximity of cleanliness to godliness is no axiom of the Cape Dutch farmer, still less of the roaming Trek-Boer. A dry, parched land, and lack of water, have doubtless had a good deal to do with this trait.

At eleven o’clock, sitting in the shade of the sail suspended between two wagons, father and daughter partake, after a long grace, of the usual meal—pieces of mutton, swimming in sheep’s-tail fat, boiled rice, coarse bread, and the eternal coffee, which, however, is just now, thanks to the sweet herbage, plenteously tempered by a supply of bokke melk (goat’s milk). Again the big Dutchman lights his pipe, and presently, yielding to the heat and the effects of his meal, falls to sleep, sitting on the sand with his back against the wagon-wheel—a moving picture of pastoral listlessness, or, if you please, pastoral sloth. The hot day wears on. At three o’clock Anna mounts to the wagon-box, and, shading her eyes from the intense glare, scans the hot plain, now dancing and shimmering with mirage. The flocks have turned for home—she can hear the far-off tinkle of their bells, borne drowsily upon the warm air; but it is not the flocks she searches for. In another half-hour she looks forth again. This time, far in the north, she picks out from the shimmer and tremble of the atmosphere a tiny cloud of dust. That is what she is expecting, and she now gives orders to the Hottentot and another boy to tend the fire, get the pot and pan in order, and fill the great kettle.

In a while you may catch the steady trample of galloping hoofs, and presently three Boers—the girl’s brothers and her betrothed—each guiding a led horse, canter up to the wagons. Following at their heels is a Hottentot after-rider, also with a spare horse heavy laden. The men are hot, dusty, and sweat-stained. Ever since yesterday morning they have been away in the grass veldt, following a trek of springboks, and their display of venison and jaded nags prove that they have hunted hard, successfully, and far. Seventy miles have they ridden; a dozen springbok have they brought in; and, greatest luck of all, the flesh, skin, and horns of a great cow gemsbok decorate the led horse of Rodolf Klopper. The gemsbok (Oryx capensis), one of the noblest of antelopes, is rare indeed in Cape Colony nowadays, even upon the verge of the Orange River, and Anna’s betrothed is proportionately elate. The gemsbok is protected, too, under heavy penalties, in the Cape Colony; but what boots this to the wandering Trek-Boer in these wild solitudes, where the echo of laws can scarce be heard, and gamekeepers are not?

At five o’clock the party are gathered beneath the wagon-sail, feasting merrily, and with some noise and laughter, on titbits of venison: the rest of the meat meanwhile being salted, to be dried for billtong on the morrow. As they sit at meat, the hunting scenes are re-enacted for the benefit of Anna and her father, and, in particular, Rodolf’s desperate chase of the gemsbok. Meanwhile, as the sun nears the horizon after his day’s tramp, the flocks, bringing with them a cloud of red dust, come in for the night. First, they drink deeply and long at the vlei, which now reflects upon its glassy surface the ruddy glories of the sunset. Then the tired creatures are kraaled, their masters rising to count them as they file in.

Darkness falls swiftly; the huge vault of sky assumes its deep indigo hue of night; the stars spring forth in glittering array; there is a wonderful and refreshing coolness in the air; the cry of one or two night birds may be heard—the dikkop and kiewitje plovers—and the distant wail of a prowling jackal.

The Boer and his sons now move their squat wagon-chairs nearer to the warm blaze of the camp-fire; they smoke vigorously, and occasionally cast stolidly a sentence at one another. Anna and her heavy lover stroll a little beyond the firelight by the edge of the vlei; their voices intermingle curiously with the clang of water-fowl—duck, geese, widgeon, and teal—from the other end of the pool. Theirs is the old, old story, told perhaps in a rougher and less romantic fashion than in Europe; yet is its refrain as earnest and its aftermath at least as kindly as in northern lands. The South African Boer makes a true and constant husband, and a good father—some people say he is a trifle too uxorious.

At eight o’clock the day is done. The party separates for the night, after a longish melancholic prayer and a chapter of the great Bible from Stuurmann. Anna goes to her kartel-bed at the end of the big wagon, lets down the achter-klap, takes off her shoes and sun-bonnet, loosens a button or two at the throat of her gown, pulls her blanket and sheepskin kaross well over her sturdy frame, and is almost instantly asleep. Her father snores loudly from the forepart of the wagon; the whole camp (including the native “boys” huddled beneath the wagons) is hushed; while all around broods the wonderful silence of night on the plains of Bushmanland.

Chapter Six.

Piet Van Staden’s Wife.

It was the year 1877. For months past the wagons of the Trek-Boers had been standing idly outspanned on the banks of the Crocodile River, (The Limpopo River is known universally in South Africa as the Crocodile) waiting for the word to move north-westward and plunge into the unknown and dreadful deserts that lay between the trekkers and the far-off land they sought. Scattered among the great trees and bushes that margined the noble river, the white wagon-tents of these strange people might be discerned dotting the landscape for the space of a mile and a half and more. Here were gathered the wildest, toughest, and most daring spirits of the Transvaal. Elephant-hunters, who longed for new and virgin lands in which to procure that ivory for which they had risked their lives so often; broken farmers, upon whom the vicissitudes of the African pastoralists’ existence had fallen heavily; and sour Doppers, whose grim religious views reminded one of the savage tenets of the Israelites of old, and who now looked eagerly across the desert for a new land of Canaan.

With these men, living in wagons and tents, were their wives and children, and such furniture and worldly gear as they could carry with them. Around them, scattered over the veldt for miles, grazed the oxen, horses, sheep, and goats that should accompany the trek. Pigs and poultry littered the encampment, and were to be seen near every wagon. All the people—elephant-hunters, malcontents, broken men, and Doppers—were animated by one and the same sentiment. They were sick of the Transvaal. There had been too much fighting—and badly managed fighting—with Sekukuni and other Kaffirs; too many commandos; taxes, those hateful creations of civilisation, were increasing, and were actually being enforced; President Burgers had been too go-ahead, too hoogmoedag (high and mighty); the seasons had been bad; and the English—those hateful English—were slowly finding their way to the north. And so the great Promised Land trek—a trek talked of for years past—was at last gathered together.

Some of these Boers, the Doppers, and they who had lived farthest from the rude semi-civilisation of that day, were possessed with the wildest beliefs. They imagined that Egypt lay just across the Zambesi River, not so very far to the north; they were convinced that they were setting forth to a land somewhere in the dim north-west, beyond Lake N’gami, where ranged snow-clad mountains beneath which sheltered a veldt rich in water, in cattle, and in corn and pasture lands, where the great game wandered just as plentifully as they had wandered in the Transvaal and Free State forty years before, when their fathers had crossed the Orange River and possessed the soil. Seventy wagons and more now stood beside the Crocodile, whose owners, heartily weary of the delays that had taken place, now anxiously awaited the return of two deputies sent to Khama, Chief of Bamangwato, through whose country they first had to pass.

One afternoon about this time a great wagon lumbered in to swell the already unwieldy proportions of the trek, and outspanned under a big tree. Word went slowly round the camp that Piet Van Staden, from Zoutpansberg, with his wife and child, had come in. Piet’s arrival in itself would have created no great stir, for Piet was a very average type of Transvaal Boer—big, not ill-looking, heavy and inert, and with very little to say for himself—but Piet’s wife was no ordinary person. She was a woman of striking beauty, far surpassing the dull ruck of South African Dutch vrouws, and possessed, moreover, of so much originality and determination of character as to have scandalised more than once her sober-minded countrywomen.

The men of Zoutpansberg swore by her. Had she not taken a rifle and ridden out time after time with her husband into the low veldt towards Delagoa Bay, and shot with her own hand giraffe and buffalo—ay, and even the mighty elephant itself? Rumour had it that on more than one occasion Hendrika Van Staden had hardened her husband’s heart at close quarters with a troop of half-mad elephants; and it was certain that she herself had, as they said, a “heart of steel,” and feared neither lion nor elephant nor fierce Kaffir.

Hendrika was a busy, active woman; and the oxen were no sooner outspanned than she got out her poultry from the bed of the wagon, extricated a table and some wagon-chairs, set one of the native boys to light the fire and prepare for the evening meal, and then, taking her six-year-old son, little Barend, set out to call upon one or two neighbours and inspect the camp. Barend, who inherited his mother’s good looks, her yellow hair, and deep blue eyes and clear complexion, was a fine, sturdy little fellow, and, clad in his short coat and loose trousers of soft mouse-coloured moleskin, a flannel shirt, and wide felt hat, looked a typical little Dutchman, a small counterpart, even to the clothes he wore, of his sturdy father. The two set off together, Barend flicking his little hide whip as he walked, and chattering to his mother with keen excitement as the various camps and outspans came into view. While his mother was engaged in conversation with some friends from her own district, the little fellow suddenly caught sight of his father walking to the next group of wagons, and toddled hastily after him.

In half an hour Hendrika had finished her gossip and extracted as much news as could be gleaned. She had not yet been down to the water; and, as the sun was declining and she wished to set eyes on the long-sought Crocodile before dark, she turned to the left hand, and, following a cattle-path, quickly found herself on the margin of the great river. Just at this point there was a bend or hook, and the stream, now at its low winter level, ran deep and swiftly only near the farther bank, leaving a broad spit of sand exposed upon the hither shore. A little higher to the left the stream again broadened into a great reach of shining water, now painted with a warm and ruddy hue by the glow of sunset. To the right, down the course of the river, a beautiful island, laden with trees and a wealth of bush and greenery, and fringed with tall yellow reeds, met the eye. Everywhere great forest trees abounded. Yellow-billed hornbills flew hither and thither among the acacias; gem-like bee-eaters flashed among the reeds; gaudy parrots, clad in blue and green and yellow, darted with shrill whistle overhead; and pearl-drab plantain-eaters uttered their loud, human-like cries at the advent of the solitary figure. Francolins down for their evening drink were calling to one another in scores, and doves cooed softly among the branches. It was a beautiful picture; but Hendrika cared little for the aesthetic aspect, the glamour of the hour, the glowing mantle of sunset. Her heart warmed, it is true, at the sight of the noble river, flowing with strength and volume even at this season of winter, and amid a parched country. But hers was the true, practical Dutch mind: she appreciated the scene only for the assurance it gave her of illimitable watering power for flocks and herds. Two hundred yards beyond, a troop of oxen came down to drink. A Dutchman was with them, and Hendrika bent her steps that way to learn whose the cattle were. The man’s back was turned, and it was not till she was within thirty yards that he heard her approach and faced her. There was a start of recognition and hesitation on either side, and then the man, a tall, good-looking Boer, furnished with a big straw-coloured beard and moustache, and dressed with rather more care than the average Transvaal farmer, came forward, and the pair shook hands in the impassive Dutch fashion. The Boer first spoke.

“And so, Vrouw Van Staden, you have come to join the trek. I scarcely looked to see you and your husband here. I had thought you were well settled on your farm in Zoutpansberg.”

“No; we are tired of that country. Our farm was good enough, and the winter veldt in the low country near at hand; but there is too much fever, and the Kaffirs are very troublesome; and as the President for years has been fighting Sekukuni, we have no strength ourselves for commandos in our own country. Cattle-stealing is worse than it has been for years. And so we thought we would join the trek and try a new country, where the game is more plentiful, and one is not to be pinched up on a farm of three thousand morgen.” (A morgen is rather more than two acres. The usual Boer farm averages three thousand morgen, more than six thousand acres.)

The woman spoke stiffly, and her face had assumed a touch of pride as she answered. But she went on: “I think it is rather I who should ask why Schalk Oosthuysen, with all his wealth, has left Marico, the garden of the Transvaal, as men call it.”

The man had gazed long and fixedly as Hendrika spoke. His eyes seemed to have softened, and a very visible pleasure was in them. And, indeed, Hendrika Van Staden was worth looking at. Clad though she was in a plain gown of rough brown material, bought at some up-country store and fashioned by herself, the admirable curves of her straight, well-rounded figure could not be concealed. Few Boer women can boast a figure. Here was a waist whose trim outlines would have done no disgrace to a well-set-up English girl. Matron though she was, the tall, shapely woman stood like a straight sapling upon the firm yellow sand. The broad chest and shoulders supported erect upon a strong and shapely neck a beautiful head. And the face? Well, most people would have agreed with Schalk Oosthuysen, whose eyes gazed with unconcealable admiration into Hendrika’s. The parting sunlight lent a wonderful charm to the oval face and the fair, clear complexion, so unlike the muddy skin of most Boer women. The soft rosy cheeks—just touched with a suspicion of African tan,—the white forehead, straight nose and proud lips, and the dark blue eyes, all set in a frame of golden yellow hair, every strand of it now glorified by the loving sun-rays, which the great sun-bonnet (kapje) ill-concealed—all went to complete a picture of feminine beauty that few Transvaalers—certainly not Schalk Oosthuysen—could resist.

Hendrika had, like most Dutch girls, married young; and now, mother though she was of a child more than six years old, was in the very pride and summer of her rich beauty.

Oosthuysen, without moving his gaze, spoke again.

“No one should know better than you, Hendrika, why I am leaving Marico and going to tempt fortune in the unknown veldt. How can I rest? Ever since I saw you, ever since the sunny years of our childhood, I have thought of you, dreamed of you. I can never marry now, unless—well, unless you should ever become free again, which is not likely before we are old people. It was you, Hendrika, that broke my happiness and disturbed my lot. Allemaghte! I am sorry almost that you have joined this trek.”

“Schalk, you have no right to speak like that. You know it was not my fault that I could not become your wife. My father had his reasons—good reasons, as I suppose; and I have a good husband, and am contented. Never speak of these things again; they are past and done with. Our ways are different, and it is better that we should see as little of one another as possible.”

She spoke almost with excitement, and her hands, folded, as all good Dutch women fold them, beneath her black apron, to protect them from the strong African sun, had become disengaged, and lent themselves with a slight gesture of impatience to enforce her words.

She turned away, saying as she went, “Good-night, Meneer Oosthuysen,” and took the path to her wagon.

“Good-night, and the Lord bless you, Hendrika,” replied the Boer, as he moved towards his oxen.

Two mornings later the Boer envoys returned from interviewing Khama. They brought word that the chief was willing to allow passage for the whole trek across his country, but that he strongly advised them to proceed in small bands at a time, or the scant waters of the thirst-land between him and the Lake River would fail them. If the whole seventy or eighty wagons attempted to cross in a body, they would find barely sufficient water to supply half a dozen spans of oxen at a time, and disaster must ensue. This was Khama’s advice; he had, as he sent word, no present quarrel with the Boers, and would help them through his country; but he urged them, if they wished to pass safely across the desert, to weigh well his words, and trek in parties of twos and threes.

There was much consultation over this message. Some few hunters, who knew the chief and had made the trek, were strongly for taking his advice; but against these few men there was strong and fierce opposition. All the ignorant, the obstinate, and the self-opinionated—and they formed the majority—held that no Kaffir’s word was to be trusted. Who was this Khama but a natural foe of the Transvaal? No doubt he wished them to travel in families of twos and threes, that he might the better attack their wagons and cut them up piecemeal.

After several days of hot discussion, it was finally decided that all should move together, and that the trek should begin with the following week, by which time the scattered flocks and herds would be collected.

It was a month after the beginning of the trek that Piet Van Staden and his wife and child found themselves in the middle of the thirst-land, between the waters of Kanne and Inkouane—that is to say, in about the worst bit of the Kalahari—in heavy sand, under a broiling sun, and without one single drop of water for their oxen, in a stretch of three days’ and three nights’ continuous travel.

There were wagons in front of them and wagons behind them; they were about the middle of the expedition. At the distance of two days and two nights from Kanne, and a whole day and night from Inkouane, their oxen could go no farther; they had had no drink at the wretched pits of Kanne, where water oozes through the sand at the rate of about half a bucket an hour; three of them lay dead in their yokes already—the rest were foundered and could trek no more. The poor brutes lowed piteously and incessantly; they came frantically round the wagon, smelling at the nearly empty water-barrel, and licking the iron tires of the wheels to give relief to their parched tongues. There was only one thing to be done.

“Hendrika,” said her husband, “I must take two of the boys and go on with the oxen. We shall reach Inkouane (it was now afternoon) early to-morrow morning. I will take a vatje, (A little vat or hand-barrel, holding about two gallons, usually slung by an iron handle under the wagon) fill it, and ride back as fast as possible. You have enough water to last till evening to-morrow. They say there is plenty at Inkouane; I shall be here to-morrow evening again, having watered the horse; and the oxen should be in by next morning. I hate leaving you and the child, but what else can be done?”

“Nothing else can be done better, Piet,” answered his wife energetically. “Get the oxen up and go on at once. Don’t lose a moment; and, mind, be back here not later than sundown to-morrow. Barend is tired and feverish already, and I shall have trouble to make the water last till then. Go at once, and the Heer God be with you.”

Hendrika’s blue eyes were full of hope and courage; she could trust her husband, and he would, no doubt, be back by nightfall of next day.

Taking two of their three native servants with him, and leaving Andries, a little Hottentot, behind with his mistress, with the strictest injunctions to have but one drink between that time and his return, Piet Van Staden kissed his wife and child, thrashed up the foundered oxen, and set forth as fast as he could get them along.