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 assuagement 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 passed 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 God, 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 noble 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, impassive 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 spaces 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 apprenticeship 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 spaces 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 titanic 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 multitudes 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 transmuted 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 noblest 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 circumstance 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 passing 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, passed 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-cum-Bucephalus, appeared on the
north-western horizon. Yes,--it was time to turn back, for the sun had
long since passed 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 shells 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 passed out of
sight. Just afterwards I heard, as though from the bowels of the earth,
a muffled 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
circumstance 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 finishing my amateur map-making, I roughly measured with a pair of
compasses 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?
But in the nights that are coming,--when the rock-python pursues the
coney along the shattered pediments of the "Corner House," the
unchanging desert will lie, still void under the abiding scrutiny of the
stars. Bushmanland can never alter.
The fire dimmed and died. One by one my companions sank into slumber.
The horses were resting,--except unquiet Bucephalus, who stamped and
whinnied at intervals. The oxen lay tethered to their yokes. Ever and
anon one of them uttered the deep, pathetic bovine sigh,--that
suspiration which seems to express perplexed resignation to the selfish
dominance of man,--to that hopeless slavery which is the doom of the
once-lordly bovine race.
I seized my kaross and climbed the steep side of the nearest
dune-tentacle. Then I laboured along its soft, sinuous surface towards
the gross, inert body of Typhon, until far beyond the reach of
camp-sounds. In the yielding sand I made a lair. In this I laid me
down--apparently the only waking thing in Bushmanland, for most utter
silence reigned. Probably the soaring flames of our camp fire had
frightened away even the jackals and the night-jars from a wide
surrounding area. The stars seemed to sink earthward; so brightly did
they glow in the vault of liquid purple that the face of the desert was
masked in impenetrable gloom. That night the lips of the wilderness had
no message audible to human sense.
Typhon slept--coiled about the feet of his granite prisoner, whose bulk
loomed menacingly against the wheeling galaxies. Did he, the belted
captive, sleep, or did he, haply, share vigil with the one solitary,
futile human soul which, maimed from the stress of days and deeds,
claimed with him brotherhood through pain and unrest. But slumber
seemed to brood over the desert like a dove and a far-off voice to
whisper across the shrouded plain: "Warte, nur--balde Ruhest du auch."