As She Believed Herself
Still A Captive, We Thought She Might Slip Away By Night; So, In Order That
She
Should not go away with the impression that we were dishonest,
we gave her a piece of meat and a
Good large bunch of beads;
at the sight of the latter she burst into a merry laugh,
and remained without suspicion.
At Nchokotsa we came upon the first of a great number of salt-pans,
covered with an efflorescence of lime, probably the nitrate.
A thick belt of mopane-trees (a `Bauhinia') hides this salt-pan,
which is twenty miles in circumference, entirely from the view of a person
coming from the southeast; and, at the time the pan burst upon our view,
the setting sun was casting a beautiful blue haze over
the white incrustations, making the whole look exactly like a lake.
Oswell threw his hat up in the air at the sight, and shouted out a huzza
which made the poor Bushwoman and the Bakwains think him mad.
I was a little behind him, and was as completely deceived by it as he;
but, as we had agreed to allow each other to behold the lake
at the same instant, I felt a little chagrined that he had, unintentionally,
got the first glance. We had no idea that the long-looked-for lake was still
more than three hundred miles distant. One reason of our mistake was,
that the River Zouga was often spoken of by the same name as the lake,
viz., Noka ea Batletli ("River of the Batletli").
The mirage on these salinas was marvelous.
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