King Solomon's Mines
beautiful and serene as ever, and, with one halt about two o’clock in
the morning, we trudged on wearily through the night, till at last the
welcome sun put a period to our labours. We drank a little and flung
ourselves down on the sand, thoroughly tired out, and soon were all
asleep. There was no need to set a watch, for we had nothing to fear
from anybody or anything in that vast untenanted plain. Our only
enemies were heat, thirst, and flies, but far rather would I have faced
any danger from man or beast than that awful trinity. This time we were
not so lucky as to find a sheltering rock to guard us from the glare of
the sun, with the result that about seven o’clock we woke up
experiencing the exact sensations one would attribute to a beefsteak on
a gridiron. We were literally being baked through and through. The
burning sun seemed to be sucking our very blood out of us. We sat up
and gasped.
“Phew,” said I, grabbing at the halo of flies which buzzed cheerfully
round my head. The heat did not affect _them_.
“My word!” said Sir Henry.
“It is hot!” echoed Good.
It was hot, indeed, and there was not a bit of shelter to be found.
Look where we would there was no rock or tree, nothing but an unending
glare, rendered dazzling by the heated air that danced over the surface
of the desert as it dances over a red-hot stove.
“What is to be done?” asked Sir Henry; “we can’t stand this for long.”
We looked at each other blankly.
“I have it,” said Good, “we must dig a hole, get in it, and cover
ourselves with the karoo bushes.”
It did not seem a very promising suggestion, but at least it was better
than nothing, so we set to work, and, with the trowel we had brought
with us and the help of our hands, in about an hour we succeeded in
delving out a patch of ground some ten feet long by twelve wide to the
depth of two feet. Then we cut a quantity of low scrub with our
hunting-knives, and creeping into the hole, pulled it over us all, with
the exception of Ventvögel, on whom, being a Hottentot, the heat had no
particular effect. This gave us some slight shelter from the burning
rays of the sun, but the atmosphere in that amateur grave can be better
imagined than described. The Black Hole of Calcutta must have been a
fool to it; indeed, to this moment I do not know how we lived through
the day. There we lay panting, and every now and again moistening our
lips from our scanty supply of water. Had we followed our inclinations
we should have finished all we possessed in the first two hours, but we
were forced to exercise the most rigid care, for if our water failed us
we knew that very soon we must perish miserably.
But everything has an end, if only you live long enough to see it, and
somehow that miserable day wore on towards evening. About three o’clock
in the afternoon we determined that we could bear it no longer. It
would be better to die walking than to be killed slowly by heat and
thirst in this dreadful hole. So taking each of us a little drink from
our fast diminishing supply of water, now warmed to about the same
temperature as a man’s blood, we staggered forward.
We had then covered some fifty miles of wilderness. If the reader will
refer to the rough copy and translation of old da Silvestra’s map, he
will see that the desert is marked as measuring forty leagues across,
and the “pan bad water” is set down as being about in the middle of it.
Now forty leagues is one hundred and twenty miles, consequently we
ought at the most to be within twelve or fifteen miles of the water if
any should really exist.
Through the afternoon we crept slowly and painfully along, scarcely
doing more than a mile and a half in an hour. At sunset we rested
again, waiting for the moon, and after drinking a little managed to get
some sleep.
Before we lay down, Umbopa pointed out to us a slight and indistinct
hillock on the flat surface of the plain about eight miles away. At the
distance it looked like an ant-hill, and as I was dropping off to sleep
I fell to wondering what it could be.
With the moon we marched again, feeling dreadfully exhausted, and
suffering tortures from thirst and prickly heat. Nobody who has not
felt it can know what we went through. We walked no longer, we
staggered, now and again falling from exhaustion, and being obliged to
call a halt every hour or so. We had scarcely energy left in us to
speak. Up to this Good had chatted and joked, for he is a merry fellow;
but now he had not a joke in him.
At last, about two o’clock, utterly worn out in body and mind, we came
to the foot of the queer hill, or sand koppie, which at first sight
resembled a gigantic ant-heap about a hundred feet high, and covering
at the base nearly two acres of ground.
Here we halted, and driven to it by our desperate thirst, sucked down
our last drops of water. We had but half a pint a head, and each of us
could have drunk a gallon.
Then we lay down. Just as I was dropping off to sleep I heard Umbopa
remark to himself in Zulu—
“If we cannot find water we shall all be dead before the moon rises
to-morrow.”
I shuddered, hot as it was. The near prospect of such an awful death is
not pleasant, but even the thought of it could not keep me from
sleeping.
CHAPTER VI.
WATER! WATER!
Two hours later, that is, about four o’clock, I woke up, for so soon as
the first heavy demand of bodily fatigue had been satisfied, the
torturing thirst from which I was suffering asserted itself. I could
sleep no more. I had been dreaming that I was bathing in a running
stream, with green banks and trees upon them, and I awoke to find
myself in this arid wilderness, and to remember, as Umbopa had said,
that if we did not find water this day we must perish miserably. No
human creature could live long without water in that heat. I sat up and
rubbed my grimy face with my dry and horny hands, as my lips and
eyelids were stuck together, and it was only after some friction and
with an effort that I was able to open them. It was not far from dawn,
but there was none of the bright feel of dawn in the air, which was
thick with a hot murkiness that I cannot describe. The others were
still sleeping.
Presently it began to grow light enough to read, so I drew out a little
pocket copy of the “Ingoldsby Legends” which I had brought with me, and
read “The Jackdaw of Rheims.” When I got to where
“A nice little boy held a golden ewer,
Embossed, and filled with water as pure
As any that flows between Rheims and Namur,”
literally I smacked my cracking lips, or rather tried to smack them.
The mere thought of that pure water made me mad. If the Cardinal had
been there with his bell, book, and candle, I would have whipped in and
drunk his water up; yes, even if he had filled it already with the suds
of soap “worthy of washing the hands of the Pope,” and I knew that the
whole consecrated curse of the Catholic Church should fall upon me for
so doing. I almost think that I must have been a little light-headed
with thirst, weariness and the want of food; for I fell to thinking how
astonished the Cardinal and his nice little boy and the jackdaw would
have looked to see a burnt up, brown-eyed, grizzly-haired little
elephant hunter suddenly bound between them, put his dirty face into
the basin, and swallow every drop of the precious water. The idea
amused me so much that I laughed or rather cackled aloud, which woke
the others, and they began to rub _their_ dirty faces and drag _their_
gummed-up lips and eyelids apart.
As soon as we were all well awake we began to discuss the situation,
which was serious enough. Not a drop of water was left. We turned the
bottles upside down, and licked their tops, but it was a failure; they
were dry as a bone. Good, who had charge of the flask of brandy, got it
out and looked at it longingly; but Sir Henry promptly took it away
from him, for to drink raw spirit would only have been to precipitate
the end.
“If we do not find water we shall die,” he said.
“If we can trust to the old Dom’s map there should be some about,” I
said; but nobody seemed to derive much satisfaction from this remark.
It was so evident that no great faith could be put in the map. Now it
was gradually growing light, and as we sat staring blankly at each
other, I observed the Hottentot Ventvögel rise and begin to walk about
with his eyes on the ground. Presently he stopped short, and uttering a
guttural exclamation, pointed to the earth.
“What is it?” we exclaimed; and rising simultaneously we went to where
he was standing staring at the sand.
“Well,” I said, “it is fresh Springbok spoor; what of it?”
“Springbucks do not go far from water,” he answered in Dutch.
“No,” I answered, “I forgot; and thank God for it.”
This little discovery put new life into us; for it is wonderful, when a
man is in a desperate position, how he catches at the slightest hope,
and feels almost happy. On a dark night a single star is better than
nothing.
Meanwhile Ventvögel was lifting his snub nose, and sniffing the hot air
for all the world like an old Impala ram who scents danger. Presently
he spoke again.
“I _smell_ water,” he said.
Then we felt quite jubilant, for we knew what a wonderful instinct
these wild-bred men possess.
Just at that moment the sun came up gloriously, and revealed so grand a
sight to our astonished eyes that for a moment or two we even forgot
our thirst.
There, not more than forty or fifty miles from us, glittering like
silver in the early rays of the morning sun, soared Sheba’s Breasts;
and stretching away for hundreds of miles on either side of them ran
the great Suliman Berg. Now that, sitting here, I attempt to describe
the extraordinary grandeur and beauty of that sight, language seems to
fail me. I am impotent even before its memory. Straight before us, rose
two enormous mountains, the like of which are not, I believe, to be
seen in Africa, if indeed there are any other such in the world,
measuring each of them at least fifteen thousand feet in height,
standing not more than a dozen miles apart, linked together by a
precipitous cliff of rock, and towering in awful white solemnity
straight into the sky. These mountains placed thus, like the pillars of
a gigantic gateway, are shaped after the fashion of a woman’s breasts,
and at times the mists and shadows beneath them take the form of a
recumbent woman, veiled mysteriously in sleep. Their bases swell gently
from the plain, looking at that distance perfectly round and smooth;
and upon the top of each is a vast hillock covered with snow, exactly
corresponding to the nipple on the female breast. The stretch of cliff
that connects them appears to be some thousands of feet in height, and
perfectly precipitous, and on each flank of them, so far as the eye can
reach, extend similar lines of cliff, broken only here and there by
flat table-topped mountains, something like the world-famed one at Cape
Town; a formation, by the way, that is very common in Africa.
To describe the comprehensive grandeur of that view is beyond my
powers. There was something so inexpressibly solemn and overpowering
about those huge volcanoes—for doubtless they are extinct
volcanoes—that it quite awed us. For a while the morning lights played
upon the snow and the brown and swelling masses beneath, and then, as
though to veil the majestic sight from our curious eyes, strange
vapours and clouds gathered and increased around the mountains, till
presently we could only trace their pure and gigantic outlines, showing
ghostlike through the fleecy envelope. Indeed, as we afterwards
discovered, usually they were wrapped in this gauze-like mist, which
doubtless accounted for our not having seen them more clearly before.