150 A NATURALIST ON THE "CHALLENGER." 



and Cape brandy, and were delighted to hear about the 

 " Challenger's " voyage. 



The old man had a huge old Dutch bible, 150 years old, 

 with pictures, maps and commentary. He prided himself very 

 much on his knowledge of it, and got it down, put on his 

 spectacles and showed me the map of the Garden of Eden, with 

 Adam and Eve and the rivers. He knew it by heart, and 

 evidently considered it as of perfect geographical accuracy. 

 But the commentary was his delight. It was the true old 

 gospel that he loved. He terribly disliked modern innovations. 



I was led to cultivate his acquaintance, because he let slip 

 at our first interview the information that he knew where, close 

 by, there was the skeleton of a Hottentot lying under a rock. 

 Directly he had said so I saw that he repented, and at first he 

 would not hear of showing me the place. He said he was afraid 

 the ghost of the skeleton would haunt him. 



It was a long time before his wife could laugh him out of 

 this notion. Eventually he showed me the place, but un- 

 fortunately the bones were rotten and the skull was battered 

 in, the man having apparently been murdered, whether Hot- 

 tentot or no, and half covered up in a hurry with a few stones. 



I had naturally a desire to see wild antelopes at the Cape. 

 I did not, however, in the least expect to see one without going 

 into the interior, and was surprised to find that antelopes still 

 exist in the Cape peninsula, and I had a shot at three of them 

 on the very Cape of Good Hope itself. I had an erroneous 

 notion concerning antelopes, that they all lived in much the 

 same way, forming vast herds that roamed over flat plains, and 

 performed migrations in bodies from one place to another as 

 scarcity of food necessitated. 



Now, however, I found that the various species are mostly 

 totally different in their habits. Some are nocturnal, some 

 diurnal ; some live on the mountains, some on the plains, some 

 amongst the bushes, some in forests ; some are gregarious, others 



solitary. 



The antelopes are all called "Bok" (goat), pronounced in 

 the country "Buck" by the Cape people. The two antelopes 

 about Simons Town are what the Dutch named, from its 



