Lodges in the Wilderness Part 3

Far, far away to the south-west I saw faithful Hendrick approaching. I would not wait for him; he was too distant. My paramount need just then was shade--even if such could only be found under the tilt of a wagon where the thermometer probably stood at 112 Fahrenheit. Hendrick's needs were elementary; he would be delighted with the meat and the inferior black feathers which I had not thought it worth while to pluck.

With the latter Hendrick and his kindred would adorn their disreputable hats. But their actions would be less opposed to Nature's plan than mine, for it was the men who would go sombrely gay, not their woman-kind.

The tramp back to camp was long and wearisome. Could it be that I strode along the same course whereon a few short hours ago I had paced hand in hand with gentle dreams? There,--on that dusty, gasping sun-scorched flat? Could it be that the stars and the soothing dew lay beyond that expanse of flaming sky, and that the laggard night, with healing on her dusky wings, would draw them down once more?

That day Danster was on his way from Gamoep with the horses. That afternoon Piet Noona and his imp-like nephew would hurry the oxen over the desert towards our camp; they should arrive the following night. On the next day we intended to break camp and trek back westward. The return journey would not be so arduous for the cattle; we should have used up the greater part of the water, and the load would be correspondingly lighter.

The horses arrived soon after sundown,--old "Prince" with his deep chest, his powerful quarters, and his broad, shoeless, almost spatulate feet. The other horse, "Bucephalus," was a big, raw-boned black stallion which Andries had in training. Hendrick was, so far, the only one able to ride him.

Night once more--with the recurrent miracle of the dew-fall and the stars. Typhon slept. Of what was he dreaming? Of the far-off day when the overflowing measure of his infamy caused the decree of his banishment to be p.r.o.nounced,--of the lands he ravaged and blighted on his southward course,--of his enemy, the rain-G.o.d, who smote him with the river-sword and thus crippled him for ever?

But man also must sleep--and on the morrow I had to journey to the Kanya-veld.

CHAPTER FIVE.

THE KANYA--THE SPELL OF THE DESERT--MY HORSE--THE TERROR OF NOON-- EXECUTION OF A MARAUDER.

Another glorious morning; the air was like cooled, sparkling wine. I knew, both by the taste and the direction of the wind, that the day would be as mild as it ever was in the desert at that season of the year. Through the faint dew-haze a hint of invitation--with a tender, enigmatic suggestion of a smile, shone out of the east. That was the day set apart for my journey to the Kanya-veld, the fringe of which lay about ten miles distant, beyond Typhon's eastern flank.

This is a region which lies solitary in the very heart of solitude.

"Kanya," in the Hottentot tongue, means "round stone," and the Kanya-veld is thickly paved with such stones. They measure, as a rule, from four to eight inches in diameter, and they lie packed so closely that they nearly touch each other. They are buried to the extent of about two-thirds of their bulk in hard, red soil. Between them a scanty, hard-bitten, salamander-like vegetation strikes root. The Kanya-veld is hardly, if at all, higher than the rest of the desert. As to what the geological explanation of this strange phenomenon may be, I have no idea whatever.

No one knew the extent of the Kanya-veld, for that part of the desert had not then been surveyed, nor even roughly charted. Before reaching the main Kanya-tract one crossed narrow strips of the closely-packed spheres; these lay outside it, after the manner of reefs surrounding a coral island.

My journey of that day was to me the most important event of the excursion,--yet it had no definite object beyond the a.s.suagement of that hunger for a realisation of the ultimate expression of solitude which sometimes gnaws at my soul. It was of what I was then to realise that I dreamt through night hours spent alone on a certain rocky hillside, when the east wind, with the scent of the desert on its wings and the music of the waste in its lightest whisper, streamed between me and the stars.

But why try to explain the inexplicable? You who have not felt a like longing would never understand; you who have, will know without a word.

Prince stood ready girthed. Swartland--renamed "Bucephalus," the black stallion with the big head and the vicious, white-rimmed eye--was recalcitrant and resented the approach of Hendrick with the saddle. But I had decided to ride on; Hendrick was not to follow until the afternoon. I threatened that faithful follower with grievous penalties if so much as a silhouette of himself and his ugly steed shewed on my sky-line until after the sun had pa.s.sed the zenith.

For we meant to be alone that day, Prince and I; to feel that we had got close enough to the heart of Solitude to hear its beats,--to try and capture in our ears, dulled by so-called civilisation, some syllables of that lore with which the desert's murmuring undertone is so rich, but which only the great of soul can fully understand. The cast of the desert's message is epic rather than lyrical. The cloud-mantled mountain and the green valley,--the forest, the stream and the foaming sea teach the poet his sweeter songs. But it is the Prophet of G.o.d, the law-giver and the warrior who listen for and learn their stern messages from the tongues of the arid wilderness.

The difference between the desert and the fertile tract is that between the ascetic and the full-fed man. The desert appeals to the intellect; the verdant, rain-nurtured valley to the emotions. The variance is as that between percipience and sensation. The stimulation with which a healthy organism responds to rigorous conditions expresses itself in an increased efficiency that is usually invincible. Thus it is that from the physically unfruitful desert all really great ideas have sprung.

The wilderness has ever been the rich storehouse of spiritual things.

Man gains corporeal, moral and intellectual power in the arid waste, and loses them in the land of corn and wine. Dearth is the parent and the tutor of thought, the desert is the harvest-field of wisdom. Solitude is the fruitful mother of n.o.ble resolve,--the kind nurse of the spirit.

I wished my horse had another, a more suitable name. "Prince" smacked of the stable--the brougham. He should have been called by some term expressive of steadfast endurance, of faithfulness,--of excellent skill as a pursuer of the oryx. That elderly bay gelding with the spatulate feet was an ideal desert mount. It was in the course of a long chase after oryx that one appreciated him to the full. I had more than once ridden him at a gallop for ten miles without a check; then, after a roll in the sand, he was apparently as fresh as ever.

One of the dangers of a desert chase lay in the mouse-city, in which on getting entangled an ordinary horse was apt to check so suddenly in his course that he rolled head-over-heels and crushed his rider. But Prince had quite an original method of meeting the difficulty: he spread his legs out in some extraordinary way, sank down until his belly almost touched the ground, and floundered through. The strange thing was that he did not seem to break his stride. There was no jerk; the rider was in no way incommoded. I would have given a great deal for a side view of the performance; it must have resembled somewhat the progress of an heraldic griffin rampaging horizontally instead of vertically.

Where the surface was suitable, neither too hard nor too soft, we cantered slowly along,--careless as the wind that gently agitated the shocks of "toa." Game was at times in sight, but very far off. Three hartebeest sped away over the sky-line, their forms looming immense and grotesque just as the mirage seized them. I wondered what they looked like when thrown on the sky-screen and seen from a distance of fifty to a hundred miles. Oryx spoor, but not very fresh, abounded.

There were no ostriches visible. Those that on the previous day stampeded eastward had no doubt gone back during the night to the locality in which Hendrick had found them. A few springbuck were occasionally to be seen, but they were exceedingly wild. One would have had to manoeuvre to get within a thousand yards of them. Now and then a paauw flew up,--a forerunner of that immense migration which would take place a few weeks later. Then the whole paauw-population of the Kalihari would cross the Orange River and move over the plains by an oblique route towards the coast. They would return over the same course after they had nested and hatched out their young.

I had brought my rifle,--more from force of habit than anything else, for I was not anxious to shoot. I was content to gaze on the enthralling, impa.s.sive face with which the world there defied the arrogant sun; to admire that quality in it which I most lacked,--its steadfastness. I wanted to breathe the desert's breath, to drink of its life,--to do it homage and to love it--not for any fleeting beauty, but because my unsteadfast soul found it loveable and strong.

I had been on foot for some time. Prince, with the reins fastened short about his neck to prevent them trailing, followed like a faithful dog.

Should I pause for what he considered too long an interval, he pushed me gently forward with his nose. He, too, wanted to explore--to wander on listlessly whither the spirit of solitude beckoned.

At length we reached the first strip of Kanya. It was hardly six feet wide,--that even, regular pavement of ironstone spheres laid down by the hand of Nature in furtherance of some aeon-old phase of world-development. Were those spheres forged in some volcano-furnace or turned in the lathe of the rolling waves in days when the temples of Atlantis gleamed white over the ocean that is its tomb and that bears its name? Were they slowly ground in the mill-vortex of some mighty river that bore away the drainage of a boundless humid tract, where now a rain-cloud is almost as rare as a comet?

Straight ahead, a little more than a mile away, the continuous Kanya-veld shewed like a darker wrinkle on the desert's brown face, for we were now out of the region of "toa." The stony strips grew wider as I advanced, and the intervening s.p.a.ces narrower and narrower until they disappeared altogether.

Here Prince and I parted company for a while; I dared not risk the possibility of injury to those faithful feet that had carried me so swiftly and so far. Even proceeding at a walking pace in the Kanya, unless every step were carefully picked, involved a risk of sprain to ankle or fetlock. So I removed the saddle and tied my companion to a bush--not because I feared his straying, but for the reason that it was otherwise impossible to prevent his following me.

It was far hotter there among the Kanya than outside, for the dark-hued stones absorbed heat and radiated it fiercely. The desert's visage had taken on a sinister, forbidding expression; almost as though it resented intrusion--as though it had surrounded some shrine of secret horror with flame-hot, laming obstacles.

The only vegetation consisted of a few low, gnarled, bitter-looking shrubs. What an apprentices.h.i.+p to inimical conditions these eremites of the vegetable world must have undergone to enable them to save their scanty leaves alive,--rooted, as they were, in a pinch of brick-like soil lying in narrow s.p.a.ces between glowing spheres of stone, and lacking rain, as they did, for periods of years at a stretch. Their strength must have been as much greater than that of the oak as the oak's is greater than that of a willow sapling. Did these shrubs ever flower, I wondered. Perhaps, once in a thousand years, a miracle was wrought on them as it was on Aaron's rod. Only one could I identify-- even so far as the genus went. It was a kind of Rhus; the dark-green, reticulated, trifid leaf--naked and deeply veined above and covered with down beneath,--was quite typical.

For what unspeakable cosmic sin was that t.i.tanic and seemingly eternal punishment inflicted,--that withdrawal of living water from a region built up and, no doubt, filled with abounding organic fecundity by the craft of its strong, creative hand? Did mult.i.tudes of those fearsome monsters of the prehistoric sea, which there swayed beneath the moon, gasp out their lives on that sun-blasted tract when the great cataclysm befel? Did a livid network of their colossal bones lie there for unthinkable ages until the slow attrition of wind and changing temperature trans.m.u.ted them into that dust which vainly tried to scale the immutable heavens in the car of the sand-spout? Did the unanealed spirits of those long-dead creatures still people that haunted solitude which made day more terrifying than midnight? Were the landscapes of the mirage simulacra of those bounding an inland sea in which the dragon and the kraken lived and multiplied? Was the thrilling fear, which read menace in my own shadow, akin to that "terror of noon" which gripped the heartstrings of the shepherd of Mount-Ida,--when he knew, by the rustling of the brake that Pan was near?

I hastened away--back to where the desert wore a friendlier face,--to where old Prince was executing a kind of solemn dance before the "taaibosch" to which he was tethered,--lifting his feet constantly, one at a time, in a vain attempt to cool them. He welcomed me with a whinny of relief. Perhaps the spirits of the Kanya had been filling him, too, with indefinable dread. So the saddle was replaced, and I resumed my pilgrimage on foot, the old horse pacing stolidly after me.

We trended southward, for I wanted to get away from the Kanya; I began to hate it--almost as I hated Typhon. Yet I should not have hated either, for if it had not been for these two, the oryx, one of the desert's n.o.blest denizens,--the aristocrat of its depleted mammal population--would long since have been exterminated. The Kanya is to the oryx a strong city of refuge from pursuit, and he draws his scanty but sufficient supply of moisture from the dunes coiled about Typhon's flanks. This seeming paradox is explained by the circ.u.mstance that a certain plant, the root of which somewhat resembles an exaggerated turnip and is heavily charged with moisture, grows in the dune-veld.

This root the oryx scents out, and digs from out the sand with his strong, sharp, heavy hoofs.

The Kanya stones, which stop a galloping horse as effectively as would a barbed wire fence, are no obstacle to the oryx, for the divisions of his hoof expand widely and are connected by a strong membrane of muscle.

They stretch apart when he treads on a stone, the membrane lying over the latter like a supporting spring. Yet, strangely enough, I once saw an oryx break its leg in pa.s.sing over a narrow strip of Kanya. This occurred many miles from where I was that day; on the southern fringe of the Kanya-tract, in fact.

It happened in this wise. One morning Hendrick and I rode ahead of the wagon. Five oryx emerged from a depression and stood at gaze about six hundred yards away. I fired at the largest bull; he lurched half-way round, sinking partly on his haunches. But he at once sprang up and fled like the wind, completely distancing the other four. I followed, putting old Prince on his mettle from the start, for the Kanya was only about five miles away, and the wounded oryx was making straight for it.

The speed of the wounded animal slackened; not to any great extent, but enough to permit of the others slowly overtaking and then drawing ahead of him. When he reached the edge of the Kanya-tract I was about to give up the pursuit in despair, when the animal swayed in a peculiar way and then stood still, so I rode up and finished him. Then I found that the bone of his left fetlock had been freshly broken. My first bullet had, without touching the bone, pa.s.sed through his right hind leg just where the great muscles of the haunch harden and thin down into sinew. The stroke of the heavy, leaden missile must have caused a severe mechanical shock. This, under stress of the gallop, evidently translated itself into stiffness, which occasioned leaning with undue heaviness on the sound leg. The oryx was crossing a strip of Kanya not more than twelve feet wide when the accident happened. Probably no similar occurrence has ever been witnessed by man.

My guardian-centaur, Hendrick-c.u.m-Bucephalus, appeared on the north-western horizon. Yes,--it was time to turn back, for the sun had long since pa.s.sed the zenith. Hendrick, as usual, looked supercilious when he found I had shot nothing. It would have been useless to have attempted to explain that Prince and I had come out that day only to talk secrets with the desert. Hendrick was too little removed from the natural man to be capable of understanding such a thing. He was an interesting creature, this Hendrick. A dash of Bushman blood in his veins had made him taciturn; the pure-bred Hottentot is almost invariably loquacious. But I found Hendrick an ideal companion. He, too,--without being aware of it, loved the desert for its own sake. But he delighted in seeing me make a good shot, and was almost pathetically puzzled on the occasions when I refrained from slaughter.

Hendrick did not on that day find it necessary to follow my sinuous spoor, but came straight towards where he knew I most probably would be.

On his way he found an ostrich nest, with the inevitable jackal in its vicinity. He had chased the marauder away, but the parent birds fled too,--and in all probability Autolycus had, even before Hendrick found me, returned to the nest with nefarious intent. There was decidedly danger, for the birds, having fled after being disturbed, would not return before night. Well,--I determined to call on that jackal and, if possible, add him to the category of the righteous of his species.

We soon found the nest. Yes, as I expected, the robber had been at work. He must, in fact, have retired and concealed himself when he saw us approaching, for the evidences of his crime were quite fresh. No doubt he was peering at us from some cover close at hand while we were examining the results of his turpitude. Two eggs had been broken; their freshly-spilt contents were soaking into the sand.

We circled round, seeking for Autolycus' spoor. How I wished I had brought a shotgun instead of a rifle. Ha! there was the thief; he sprang from the shadow of a large tussock and ran diagonally away, his brush pointed contemptuously straight at us. What was his objective? I saw it--a heap of ejected sand about two hundred yards off, which he was heading straight for, evidently masked his burrow. I sat down, adjusted the sight of my rifle and drew the bead on the heap of sand.

When he reached the threshold of his refuge the jackal did exactly what a long experience of the habits of his obnoxious tribe had led me to expect,--that is to say he sank his hindquarters into the burrow and then turned to look back, as though in derision,--his head, chest and forelegs being exposed. Crack,--and he fell back and disappeared. But I knew well enough that the bullet had fetched him; I heard its "klop"

distinctly.

Hendrick hurried to the jackal's burrow; I returned to the nest. The broken sh.e.l.ls had to be removed and the spilt yolks sanded over; otherwise the birds would most probably have abandoned the clutch.

There were three and twenty undamaged eggs remaining. Having put things as straight as possible, I rejoined Hendrick.

The jackal had disappeared into his burrow, but a big gout of blood just inside the entrance told an unambiguous tale. Hendrick wormed his way into the strait and narrow cavern as far as he thought he safely could; he emerged empty-handed, but with traces of blood on his clothing.

However, Hendrick was not the Hottentot to forego a feast of jackal-flesh without a further effort, so he uncoiled a reim from the head-stall of Bucephalus, tied one end of it round his feet and gave me the other to hold; then he re-entered the dark portal and pa.s.sed out of sight. Just afterwards I heard, as though from the bowels of the earth, a m.u.f.fled shout. I hauled strenuously at the reim and Hendrick emerged, the dead jackal in his arms. In that cobra-haunted country I would not have attempted Hendrick's feat for a jackal-skinful of gold.

After this useful piece of police-work we rode back to camp at an easy pace. Bucephalus always grew cantankerous at the smell of blood, so the mortal remnants of Autolycus had to be tied behind my saddle,--a circ.u.mstance which occasioned a good deal of chaff on the part of Andries.

That night I spread out my large-scale map of South Africa on boards which I had brought for the purpose. It was my wont to fill in roughly any physical data which I was able to determine. The air was so still that the flame of a lit match hardly flickered. The vicinity of the wagon was as bright as day, for we had built an enormous fire. The flame of the candle-bush shone as clear as the electric arc, and arose in a tall pyramid. Our shooting was at an end, so we did not mind our presence being advertised throughout the desert. The oxen had returned from Gamoep. All preparations for a start before dawn on the morrow had been made.

After finis.h.i.+ng my amateur map-making, I roughly measured with a pair of compa.s.ses the distance we had travelled from the vicinity of the Copper Mines. Thus I found that if we were to travel only four times as far, altering our course a little to the northward, we would reach Johannesburg. A change, indeed. How great would have been the contrast between Bushmanland, the abode of immemorial silence and solitude, and what was probably the most intensely active (in a mechanical sense) environment on earth. And yet, but a few short years before, when I first crossed it, the Rand lay as lonely as Bantom Berg. But now I could almost hear the ten-thousand-fold thudding of the stamps,--the thunderous explosions vexing the bowels of the earth--the din of the strenuous, diversified throng in the streets.

They say that men soon wear themselves out in the city of gold and sin; that the gravestones there are mostly those of the young. What is to be the effect of this burning fever-spot on our body-politic, of this--to change the metaphor--roaring maelstrom-mill into the hopper of which so large a proportion of the youth of our country is flung?