104 LODGES IN THE WILDERNESS 



camp and scatter in the darkness. Hours 

 afterwards they might repeat the attack. If 

 the travellers were deep in the desert the re- 

 petition would perhaps be delayed until the 

 following night, for the Bushmen took no 

 avoidable risks. Usually the oxen or horses 

 forming the span would also be slain. One 

 can imagine the plight of a party of travellers 

 under such circumstances : half of them dead 

 or dying in agony, the survivors cowering in a 

 wagon as hopelessly tethered to a lonely spot 

 in a trackless waste as a wrecked ship is 

 chained to the reef that gores her side. They 

 would have been ringed round with drought 

 and famine; close prisoners in a solitude only 

 mitigated by the unseen presence of implac- 

 able foes, the stroke of whose dart was as silent 

 and deadly as that of the snake. 



Yet these Bushmen had sufficient justifica- 

 tion for all the terrible reprisals they perpe- 

 trated. They were the original dwellers of the 

 soil ; the Hottentots came, dispossessed them 

 of their best water-places and slaughtered 

 them without mercy. When they migrated 

 eastward they met the Kaffirs, who proved a 

 more formidable and quite as pitiless a foe. 

 In the storming of the Bushmen's strongholds 

 their women and children were speared or 



