The People Dig For It There,
And Are Fond Of It When Roasted, On Account Of Its Pleasant Vegetable Taste.
When About To Pass Into The Chrysalis State, It Buries Itself In The Soil,
And Is Sometimes Sought For As Food Even Then.
If left undisturbed,
it comes forth as a beautiful butterfly:
The transmutation
was sometimes employed by me with good effect when speaking with the natives,
as an illustration of our own great change and resurrection.
The soil is sandy, and there are here and there indications
that at spots which now afford no water whatever there were formerly
wells and cattle stations.
Boatlanama, our next station, is a lovely spot in the otherwise dry region.
The wells from which we had to lift out the water for our cattle are deep,
but they were well filled. A few villages of Bakalahari were found near them,
and great numbers of pallahs, springbucks, Guinea-fowl, and small monkeys.
Lopepe came next. This place afforded another proof
of the desiccation of the country. The first time I passed it,
Lopepe was a large pool with a stream flowing out of it to the south;
now it was with difficulty we could get our cattle watered
by digging down in the bottom of a well.
At Mashue - where we found a never-failing supply of pure water
in a sandstone rocky hollow - we left the road to the Bamangwato hills,
and struck away to the north into the Desert. Having watered the cattle
at a well called Lobotani, about N.W. of Bamangwato, we next proceeded
to a real Kalahari fountain, called Serotli. The country around is covered
with bushes and trees of a kind of leguminosae, with lilac flowers.
The soil is soft white sand, very trying to the strength of the oxen,
as the wheels sink into it over the felloes and drag heavily. At Serotli
we found only a few hollows like those made by the buffalo and rhinoceros
when they roll themselves in the mud. In a corner of one of these
there appeared water, which would have been quickly lapped up by our dogs,
had we not driven them away. And yet this was all the apparent supply
for some eighty oxen, twenty horses, and about a score of men.
Our guide, Ramotobi, who had spent his youth in the Desert, declared that,
though appearances were against us, there was plenty of water at hand.
We had our misgivings, for the spades were soon produced;
but our guides, despising such new-fangled aid, began in good earnest
to scrape out the sand with their hands. The only water we had any promise of
for the next seventy miles - that is, for a journey of three days
with the wagons - was to be got here. By the aid of both spades and fingers
two of the holes were cleared out, so as to form pits
six feet deep and about as many broad. Our guides were especially earnest
in their injunctions to us not to break through the hard stratum of sand
at the bottom, because they knew, if it were broken through,
"the water would go away." They are quite correct, for the water seems to lie
on this flooring of incipient sandstone.
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