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