W. C. Scully

“ The far, faint yowl of a jackal sounded from the direction of the dunes; it reminded him of Nathan’s hoarse, despairing scream when he realised that he was abandoned to die of thirst. The mat-house, with its population of mysterious shadows and huddled shapes, became intolerable. Better the sense of freedom outside under the accusing stars, where a man can get away from the thing that seems to crawl to his feet as though to clasp his knees. He lifted the door-flap and stepped out into the night.
The Hottentot servants had inhabited a scherm about fifty yards to the rear of the camp. ”

“ Gemsbok had now no companion but his dog, which was an animal as friendless as its master. All day long alone in the veld, under the changeless Desert sky; all night long alone in the scherm, under the unregarding stars. Man is a gregarious animal, and the burthen of one’s own presence galls as only those burthens do which carry as dead weight the broken shackles of one of Nature’s disregarded laws.
Sleep was difficult to get. It had been usual for the old couple to remain awake talking half the night through. Lying awake alone proved to be a very different thing. ”

“ Makalipa, Noquala’s wife, was sitting in the sun at the side of the hut, lazily engaged in making a mat out of rushes. She addressed her husband by name once or twice, but he, being absorbed in the contemplation of his herd of cattle, which was the thing he most loved in the world—his children not excepted—took no notice whatever of her.
“You, you—I wonder you do not sleep in the kraal; I wonder you do not eat grass,” she said, in an audible soliloquy. “If I loved cattle like you do I would tie a pair of horns on my head and go on all fours. ”

“ The still, huddled figure lying in the sand at the bottom of the gully was as if photographed on the retina—it was literally so vividly before his mental vision that physical vision seemed to be suspended. And the pain in his toe! He longed to take off the veldschoen and ease the pressure, to examine the injury, regarding which he was consumed with a deadly curiosity, but he hated to attract Nathan’s attention.
He moved the foot slightly and the agony almost made him shriek aloud. A spasm of frantic terror gripped him by the heart-strings until he nearly swooned. Why, the man must be dead. ”

“ The strange funeral cortège wended up between the camps of Namies. Oom Schulpad walked at the side, holding the reins; Max, with bent head, followed close behind the body.
So they laid Gert Gemsbok in the sand, next to his “Old Woman” and with his broken ramkee at his side. If what some tell us about a future life be true, that ramkee will surely be recreated in the celestial equivalents of the rarest earthly instruments of music—if not something as valuable and more sonorous.
Old Schalk was sitting in the moonlight at the door of his mat-house talking to a few cronies when the funeral passed. ”

“ The noble, dun-coloured bull still stalked about majestically, breathing love and defiance in his low. Well, thought Noquala, surely all his cattle would not die; he would be left with a few with which to begin again with. Just the dun-coloured bull and a few cows. It would be a joy once more to build up wealth. No one ever heard of such a thing as that a multitude of cattle, such as his, should die out of any disease. Alas! no one with whom Noquala had foregathered had ever heard an adequate account of the fell effects of the rinderpest. ”

“ From the same place the desert grouse, which strongly resembles the sand-grouse of Central Asia, throng over in countless myriads. These collect around the open water-places every morning when the sun begins to sting. One dip of water they must have. If the sportsman is hard-hearted enough to remain close to the water-hole, they circle round and round uttering their plaintive cry in a myriad-voiced chorus of strange twitterings. Should the day be hot and no other water obtainable in the neighbourhood—as is often the case—they will drink at one’s very feet. ”

“ Up to Friday morning Koos Bester had no opportunity of carrying out his intention of giving Gert Gemsbok a thrashing on the quiet. By Thursday night he had quite given up the idea. His slow mind had gradually come to recognise that he had better leave the old Hottentot alone—this in spite of Nathan’s daily promptings on the subject. The old man looked so frail and bent. Some unrecognised remnant of chivalry in the Boer’s nature made him dimly see that for a man of his strength to attack one who would be as a child in his hands would be base and cowardly. ”

“ Who that has ever been fortunate enough to experience it can recall without a quickening pulse the mad gallop for miles across the plains after a herd of gemsbok, or the fierce rapture of meeting the noble brute at bay, and slaying the only animal of the antelope tribe that has heart enough to face a lion? ”

“ It was strange to hear this echo of one of the lying cries of the Judenhetze in this remote corner of an African Desert.
“You must wait and ask my brother,” repeated Max.
“Yes; they are a wicked lot in their religion,” continued Old Schalk. “Fancy a religion that forbids one to eat pork and teaches you to eat children—not their own children, oh no, but Christian children that they steal in the streets of the big towns, and then fatten up for the Passover!”
“But, uncle, I don’t think they do so any more,” said Susannah, moved by the pain in Max’s face. ”

“ Are you the vagabond Bushman who got Willem Bester into the tronk?”
“I am he, Baas.”
“And you come to ask me to give you work?”
“I only told the truth, Baas.”
“Ach, what does a Bushman know about truth?”
“If I did a sin when I spoke the truth, Baas, I have had my punishment: for six long years I have lived like a badger in a hole. I am a human being, Baas; let me come back and live among other human beings.”
“No, no, schepsel; not a Boer in Bushmanland will give you work. Willem Bester died in the tronk. ”

“ Max was rapidly developing from a boy into a man, and many of the little traits specially characteristic of modern Israel began to show themselves in him. Of Old Schalk he stood in awe; the brutal directness of the way in which the old Boer uttered all his thoughts frightened him. Mrs Hattingh, however, had ceased to impress him since the day she had obtained the dresses for her granddaughters fraudulently and on the strength of his attachment to Susannah. Max felt that he held her at a moral disadvantage, and she tacitly acquiesced in this. ”

“ Then he started as if about to rise. For an instant it seemed as though he would succeed, for he lifted his gaunt trunk upon his front legs, and swept a dazed and startled gaze from one to the other of the carcases of his dead companions which lay around him. But he could get no farther; his hind quarters were paralysed. He remained thus for a few seconds, then, with a roar that seemed to shake the hills, he sank back and died.
Noquala was found at daybreak sitting on the ground close to the carcase of the bull. His head lay forward upon his bent knees; his grey hair was whitened by the frost. ”

“ The fresh, crisp air of early morning; the peace which sinks like a benediction upon the wearied earth when the scorching sun has fallen from the sky, and the sand gives off its heat in rapid radiation; the sense of immensity made manifest in the wide, wide plains by day, and in the almost supernaturally bright skies at night ”

“ So the three miserable beings wandered about the Desert from water-place to water-place, digging for “veld-kost”—the generic name by which the many species of edible bulbs, leaves, and tubers with which the fringe of the Desert abounds, are known. In the short and adventitious spring, when the leaves appearing through the sand indicated the proper spots to dig at, life was comparatively easy, but after the northern winds had scorched away the herbage it was only by a bitter struggle that body and soul could be kept together. ”

“ The grass with which the greater part of the plain is covered grows in thick shocks some thirty inches in height, from raised tussocks about six feet apart. In dry weather the fibre of the grass crumbles away in dust and the tussock turns black. After rain, however, the new blades shoot out with marvellous rapidity, and the Desert becomes a sea of waving plumes, which are tinted a beautifully delicate green. ”

“ Nature, in her spring guise, has to do her work in the Desert, when she does it at all, in a hurry. There the seasons do not follow the regular course. At the end of her summer revel in other southern lands she sometimes suddenly bethinks her that away to the northward she has been for long neglectful of her duties, so she flies to the arid plains, where perhaps the very traces of her footprints have been long since forgotten. ”

“ They sheered off, feeding tamely, to either side. The meerkats scuttled back to their low, burrow-pierced mounds, where they sat erect on a tripod, formed by hind legs and tail, ready to dart underground. The striped-faced gemsbuck-mice dashed wildly into their burrows in terror, and then out again in uncontrollable curiosity.
As they walked homeward in the short gloaming Max asked Susannah if she would always be true, even if her people were against him and his brother drove him away. The girl looked straight into his eyes and answered “Yes,” in a clear, low tone. ”

“ Mrs Hattingh was in the centre—she leant heavily on the arms of her granddaughters. As the three entered the shop, the two girls looked at Max with an expression of indescribable slyness. Max groaned in spirit; Nathan had given him strict injunctions that on no account whatever were any members of the Hattingh family to get any more credit. He knew instinctively that this was what they had now come to ask for.
Mrs Hattingh sat down heavily upon a packing-case, panting from the exertions of her walk. Maria and Petronella lifted the flap of the counter quite unceremoniously and walked in. ”

“ Brown with the gleanings of tens of thousands of square miles of loamy hill and dale swept by furious thunderstorms, clogged with the detritus gathered from flooded flat and spate-ravaged kloof, foul with the rubbish from many a distant mining camp on the banks of its tributary, the Vaal, the torrent swept irresistibly on with a growling roar, the might of which could not be realised without receding for some distance from the bank. ”

“ He thinks a Jew can become a Christian as easily as a man can change his shirt. Did you ever hear of a jackal turning into a tame dog in a day?” Max flushed hotly but made no reply. “I never heard of such a thing in all my life,” continued the old Boer. “It is not even as if you were rich and had a shop of your own; but you are only a poor little boy without anything. Look here, I do not want your brother Nathan to think that I have had anything to do with this foolishness.” ”

“ Oom Schulpad was an elderly and deformed man who owned a disreputable-looking cart and three small donkeys, by means of which he used to make extremely long journeys through the Desert, which he knew as well as he knew his instrument. In many places where another would have died of thirst, Oom Schulpad could find water. Music and hunting were his two passions, and he loved his rifle as much as his fiddle. Sometimes he would penetrate deep into the dunes, and return with a load of gemsbok bultong. ”

“ But Nathan was now a fortnight overdue, and was daily expected to arrive.
On the afternoon of the second Sunday after the meeting at the foot of the koekerboom on the top of the kopje, Max suddenly made up his mind and did what was for him a very heroic deed. He put on his best clothes, went boldly over to the Hattingh camp, at which there was a large miscellaneous gathering. He walked around the circle and shook hands with every one present. Then he took his seat next to Susannah, who blushed with pleasure at her lover’s daring. ”

“ Then came the inevitably recurring drought, this time one of exceptional severity. The sheep and goats became thinner and thinner, until they were too weak to go abroad and seek for pasturage. They lay on the sand all day long, eyeing piteously the troughs to which their diminishing dole of water was lifted from the well by the creaking derrick. At last the maddened cattle flung themselves down the well, and their ruined owners were hardly able to drag themselves to the arid banks of the Orange River down the sand-choked gorge at Pella. ”

“ After a large “trek,” as the annual migration of these animals across the Desert is called, has taken place, the wake of the host looks like an irregularly-ploughed field. Every vestige of vegetation is beaten out by the small, sharp, strong hoofs. It seems at such times as if all the springbucks in the Desert were suddenly smitten by a mad desire to collect and dash towards a certain point.
The springbucks as a rule live without drinking. Sometimes, however—perhaps once in ten years—they develop a raging thirst, and rush madly forward until they find water. ”