CHAPTER XIV 



SPRINGBOKS ON A SALT-PAN 



Ngamiland and its salt-pans — Wonderful mirage — Mistake of 

 Oswell and Livingstone — Chukutsa Pan — Former plenty of 

 wild animals — Salt-pans still haunted by game — Beloved by 

 springboks — Early morning in the desert — A blue Wilde- 

 beest — The salt-pan at sunrise — Springboks, their tricks and 

 graces — Bird life — A shot for breakfast — The deserted Pan. 



In the vast, little-known solitudes of Ngamiland 

 there are few things more strange or more character- 

 istic than those immense salt-pans which, like dead 

 and silent seas, lie scattered round about the reed 

 marshes of Lake Komadau and the lower reaches of 

 the Botletli river. Livingstone, with his quick eye 

 and unerring instinct, pointed to these salt-pans as 

 the exhausted and dried-up remains of that great 

 inland water, which, thousands of years ago — before 

 the Zambesi had been torn from its southern course 

 and deflected eastward — overspread all this part 

 of Southern Africa. He pointed rightly to Lake 

 Ngami as the last puddle of this once mighty lake. 

 Since Livingstone's first discovery of Ngami in 1849 



the truth of his early theory has become more and 

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