194 NATURE AND SPORT IN SOUTH AFRICA 



horses, were all real enough. We were in the middle 

 of a spell of sixty-five miles of utterly waterless 

 country, and we panted for the cool Lake river for 

 which we were riding. 



In Livingstone's time all this country of the salt- 

 pans was black with game. No gun had then ever 

 desecrated those remote solitudes. Now-a-days, alas ! 

 much of the nobler game has gone ; the troops of 

 elephants, the sour, bulky rhinoceroses, the thousands 

 of buffalo, then frequenting the banks of the Lake 

 river (Botletli),^ all have vanished. The shy and 

 timid giraffe, which in Livingstone's day and much 

 later wandered to the very margin of the river, now 

 never crosses the plain, but secludes itself in the dry 

 sanctuaries of the Kalahari forest, twenty or thirty 

 miles to the southward. 



Yet though the native gunner, the Trek Boer, 

 and the passing Englishman have driven off and 

 destroyed the grander fauna, this primeval region is 

 still a haunt of the more wary and less easily destroyed 

 game. The rare roan antelope, the gemsbok, the 

 koodoo, the hartebeest, and the ostrich still come at 

 night and early morning to taste the salt brack. The 

 grotesque brindled gnu and the beautifully painted 

 Burchell zebra, and in pursuit of them the lion, still 



1 The Botletli is called, invariably, by hunters and traders 

 of the interior, the " Lake river." It is connected in its upper 

 course with Lake Ngami by a channel or arm of water. 



