Chap, vi.] CAPE ANTELOrES. 1 29 



In my excursions to White Sands I often stopped at the 

 cottage of an old-fashioned " boer." He was a boer in a very 

 small way : an old man who, at the age of nearly sixty, had 

 married a young wife. He was partly of French parentage, 

 many French having come to the Cape at the time of the 

 Revolution. These people were wonderfully hospitable, and 

 gave me milk, coffee, 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 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 that 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 

 resemblance to that animal, the roebuck, " Rheebok " {Pelea 

 sapreola) and the " Grysbok " (grey goat) {CaIotrai:^us nielanotis). 



