Kalahari Desert

“ In passing across the great Kalahari desert we met with the Bushmen, or Bakalahari, who, from dread of visits from strange tribes, choose their residences far away from water, hiding their supplies of this necessity for life in pits filled up by women, who pass every drop through their mouths as a pump, using a straw to guide the stream into the vessel. They will never disclose this supply to strangers, but by sitting down and waiting with patience until the villagers were led to form a favourable opinion of us, a woman would bring out a shell full of the precious fluid from I knew not where. ”

“ Out of the long defiles and valleys we threaded our way into the open country, past the huge flat-topped mountains of Ombokoro, the fastness of the Berg Damaras, thence following the dry river-bed of the Om- Mafako north-east to the confines of the Omaheke desert that great north-western outlier of the true Kalahari not far, indeed, from this very spot! So far the trek had been slow and tedious, but without untoward incident. We were well armed, and those natives who did not avoid us were only too eager to bring in food, or show us water in return for our trade goods. ”

“ The Southern Kalahari, with its fine ranching possibilities and its remarkable “pans,” is still a huge “Royal Game Reserve,” forbidden to the farmer and the prospector; and though the dry Kuruman River (Chapter XVII) was the route for the flying invasion of German South-West (to the astonishment of the Germans, who believed the desert impossible by troops) , the desert has long since claimed its own again: and the region is once more given over to the vast herds of gemsbok and a few wandering Bushmen. ”

“ Covered with dry, short grass, the plain was perfectly level as far as the horizon. Behind lay a line of hills forming the southern boundary of the Kalahari desert; towards the north the plain seemed boundless. ”

“ In the Kalahari Desert it is no uncommon sight to see the women resorting to some hidden supply of water, with twenty or thirty of their water vessels in a bag or net slung over their backs. These vessels consist of ostrich eggshells, with a hole in the end of each large enough to admit one's finger. The process of filling them we have already learned in the description of the Kalahari Desert.
The Bushmen never touch the eggs, nor leave marks of human feet near them, when they find a nest. ”

“ You know what the Tanezruft is, the "plain of plains," abandoned, uninhabitable, the country of hunger and thirst. We were then starting on the part of the desert which Duveyrier calls the Tassili of the south, and which figures on the maps of the Minister of Public Works under this attractive title: "Rocky plateau, without water, without vegetation, inhospitable for man and beast."
Nothing, unless parts of the Kalahari, is more frightful than this rocky desert. Oh, Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh did not exaggerate in saying that no one would dream of following us into that country. ”

“ In the water-melon season a few white farmers living on the edge of the desert send their herds thither to graze. Such few spots as have been under cultivation by artificial irrigation yield excellent returns to the farmer; but the chief commercial products of the desert are the skins of animals.
The Kalahari is the home of wandering Bushmen (q.v.) , who live entirely by the chase, killing their prey with poisoned arrows, of Ba-Kalahari, and along the western border of Hottentots, who are both hunters and cattle-rearers. ”

“ Away from the track some buck of the commoner kinds may still be found, and farther to the west there is still plenty of big game in the Kalahari Desert. But the region which we traversed is almost as unattractive to the sportsman as it is to the lover of beauty. ”

“ The central depression of the Kalahari Desert and Ngami Basin in the southern part of the highland, and the deep valleys cut by the rivers that drain this interior basin, serve to divide this southern region into four well-marked isolated plateaus. The most southerly plateau occupies the Cape, Natal, Orange River, and Transvaal colonies, and their seaward edges, known as the Roggeveld, Schnee, Zwarte, and Drakenberg mountains, rise in single peaks of 9000 to 11,000 feet. North of the Transvaal, between the Limpopo and the Zambezi valleys, is the less extensive plateau of Matabeleland. ”

“ Zwartmodder is a weird and desolate little place standing in a deep, narrow, rock-walled valley, whose sandy floor was the bed of the ancient river that once flowed right across what is now the Kalahari Desert from near Mafeking, westward, and then south, for many hundreds of miles, till it joined the Orange below the great falls of Aughrabies. In most places it is sand-choked to the level of the surrounding desert. In others, though still dry, it is filled with vegetation, and indeed many stretches farther north are well timbered, with fine mimosa and other thorn-trees. ”

“ They come from the great Kalahari Desert, and, when first seen after crossing the colonial boundary, are said often to exceed forty thousand in number. I can not give an estimate of their numbers, for they appear spread over a vast expanse of country, and make a quivering motion as they feed, and move, and toss their graceful horns. They feed chiefly on grass; and as they come from the north about the time when the grass most abounds, it can not be want of food that prompts the movement. ”

“ It is truly "darkest Africa;" for, first, the slave trade and then the rum bottle have in many parts been the preponderating representatives to them of outer civilization.
The next layer is a step or terrace of flat sandy semi-arid country, narrow in the tropics, widening toward each extreme, until it bulges out in the north into the Sahara desert, in the south into the Kalahari, some parts always bare and sandy or covered with a sparkling saline or alkaline deposit, some parts forming broad savannas or prairies, bearing rich grasses in the rains, burnt bare in the dry season ”

“ The regions which receive the least quantity of moisture are the plain of the Great Karroo, the basin of the Ixiwer Orange, and the Kalahari Desert. Here the rains are irregular, but when they do fall they burst like a sudden deluge over the plains. In this Dorst-veld, or "Thirsty land," vast stretches are covered with sands, which are disposed in dunes rolling away beyond the horizon like the ocean waves, and often clothed in vegetation. Springs are rare, in some districts occurring only at long intervals of fifty or sixty miles ”

“ Saline Mountains," at the northern extremity of the whole system, still present an imposing aspect, thanks to the precipitous slope of their escarpments down to the valley of the Limpopo. Towards the south-west some disconnected ranges of hills and scattered heights serve to break the monotony of the upland plains, which descend with a gentle incline towards the less elevated depression of the Kalahari Desert. But these eminences produce little effect, owing to the great relative altitude of the surrounding plateau. ”

“ That terrible Zulu, Dirk, was there! You ought to see all daddy's trophies—beautiful pelts, Koodoo horns, hides, and ivory from many a fine tusker! Daddy had plenty of big game shooting—lions, elephants and everything! Several times he almost lost his life. But all that was before mother died, and Aunt Edith brought me here to father. But I want to go home."
"But is the Kalahari Desert as bad as people say?"
"Worse! It's just thousands and thousands of miles of burning hot sand. Nothing grows there but a few dried-up low Karroo bushes. ”

“ Owing to the dryness of the air, due to the proximity of the Kalahari desert, the western and central districts are specially favourable to persons suffering from consumption and other chest complaints. ”

“ Even German South-west Africa differs scarcely at all from the Kalahari Desert, which adjoins it and which forms the western part of Bechuanaland, and differs little also from the north-western regions of Cape Colony. ”

“ We were now skirting the south-west extremity of the Reserve, which stretched east in a vast, dim, featureless, and apparently boundless world of sand-dunes, but the spot at which we intended entering it was still days to the north. The few habitations became fewer and wider apart, a long day’s journey of heavy sand-dunes usually dividing “neighbours” in this lonely fringe of huge desert farmlands on the Kalahari border, and water being unobtainable in between [Page 238] them. In fact, numbers of these vast surveyed desert farms had neither permanent water nor habitation on them. ”

“ These degraded wanderers inhabit an area extending from the inner ranges of the mountains of Cape Colony, through the central Kalahari desert, to near Lake Ngami, and thence northwestward to the Ovambo River. ”

“ When the present war broke out, I proceeded once more on my extensive travels, and I became something of an expert in the waterless, sandy wastes of the southern half of German Southwest Africa. As for the Kalahari Desert, over which the movement of men and transport was supposed to be quite impossible, we did not rest until we had sunk bore-holes for water for hundreds of miles, and until we had moved a large force of thousands of mounted men across an area in which it was thought no human being could ever move. ”

“ Pointing to the great Kalahari Desert, he said, 'You never can cross that country to the tribes beyond; it is utterly impossible even for us black men, except in certain seasons, when more than the usual supply of rain falls, and an extraordinary growth of watermelons follows. ”

“ The distance may have been short, but to a hungry and thirsty man it seemed endless, as one hill after another was topped without any result. We found a fork in the road, and took the turn to the left as being more our idea of the way. As it happened we were trekking straight for the Kalahari Desert, and but for the lucky sound of a waggon on the other road might have been floundering there to-day. ”

“ The landscape was uninviting; the hills, destitute of trees, were of a dark brown color, and the scanty vegetation on the plains made me feel that they deserved the name of Desert more than the Kalahari. When first taken possession of, these parts are said to have been covered with a coating of grass, but that has disappeared with the antelopes which fed upon it, and a crop of mesembryanthemums and crassulas occupies its place. It is curious to observe how, in nature, organizations the most dissimilar are mutually dependent on each other for their perpetuation. ”

“ The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert are shorter than their Hottentot kindred who pasture their flocks and herds in the neighboring grasslands.41 Samoyedes, Lapps, and other hyperborean races of Eurasia are shorter than their more southern neighbors, the physical record of an immemorial struggle against cold and hunger. ”

“ He would account for desert tracts like Kalahari by the fact that the east and southeast winds, laden with moisture from the Indian Ocean, get cooled over the coast ranges of mountains, and having discharged their vapor there had no spare moisture to deposit over the regions that for want of it became deserts. The geology of Southern Africa was peculiar ”

“ Kâla, the Hindu Chronus, or god of time, who, as in the Greek mythology, at once produces and devours all things.
Kalahari Desert, in S. Africa, stretches far northward from the Orange River between German SW. Africa and the Transvaal, an elevated plateau, not really desert, but covered with scrub and affording coarse pasturage for cattle.
Kalamazoo` (18) , a railway centre and flourishing town in the SW. of Michigan, 144 m. NE. of Chicago; manufactures machinery, paper, and flour. ”

“ In the Desert of Kalahari exists an abundant and varied vegetation. According to Dr. Livingstone, it is an immense plain which nourishes a prodigious quantity of herbaceous plants, generally of very small elevation, and besprinkled at intervals with thickets of bushy shrubs. The herbs which are enabled to withstand the prolonged droughts of these arid localities are species with tuberous roots, creeping or spindle-like, and deeply buried in the ground. ”

“ To refer again to these tales; the description of Rip Van Winkle's ride through the desert, the sand-storm, the huge salt "pans," and indeed most of the earlier incidents, have been but common-place experiences of my own in the wastes of the southern Kalahari, slightly altered for the purposes of the story. Even the "poison flowers" exist there and no Bushman will sleep among them, beautiful as they are. ”

“ Whilst imagination has naturally played the chief part in these tales, the descriptions given of certain parts of this little-known region are accurate, and by no means overdrawn; at the same time, though they treat principally of the dangerous and waterless desert, it must be borne in mind that although the sand dunes form one of Damaraland's most striking features, yet it is by no means altogether the barren, scorching dust-heap it is popularly believed to be. ”

“ Climate: desert; hot, dry; rainfall sparse and erratic
Terrain: mostly high plateau; Namib Desert along coast; Kalahari
Desert in east
Natural resources: diamonds, copper, uranium, gold, lead, tin, lithium, cadmium, zinc, salt, vanadium, natural gas, fish; suspected deposits of oil, natural gas, coal, iron ore
Land use: arable land: 1% permanent crops: 0% meadows and pastures: 64% forest and woodland: 22% other: 13%
Irrigated land: 40 sq km (1989 est.) ”