1 30 BIG GAME SHOOTING 



of the oryx resembling the work of the African Bushmen, and 

 an early traveller may easily have taken them for representa- 

 tions of an animal with one horn, and have started the idea 

 of the unicorn, Biblical and heraldic. With regard to the 

 former, the word in the Hebrew in our version rendered 

 unicorn is ' reem ' ; in some old English Bibles, indeed, ' reem ' 

 has been preserved in the text untranslated. Again, I am told 

 that the Syrian congener of the the Cape oryx is called by the 

 Arabs of to-day *Jj ' reem.' l Is it not likely then, that the 

 Biblical Unicorn is the same as the ' reem ' of the Arab ? As 

 an heraldic beast, the gemsbok lends himself most gallantly 

 to the theory ; he is a strongly marked equine antelope, and is 

 the one of his family that frequently lowers his head to show 

 fight, it is said even with the lion and this is confirmed in 

 song, though he certainly got the worst of it in poetry, as I 

 very much think he would in real life. 



The gemsbok is scarce, and hardly met with save in the 

 barren open stretches of country like the Bakalahari desert ; 

 there were more near the colony in my day than further in. 

 He can do without water for a long time certainly indeed I 

 believe altogether. He digs and eats watery roots such as 

 luhoshe, a large tuber, and the bitter desert gourd ; if rain 

 falls, or he comes across water, he drinks, no doubt, but he does 

 not need it to support life. His country is also the stronghold 

 of the Bushmen, who can, as I have said before, live for months 

 under the same conditions, but who generally obtain water by 

 boring with a long pole through the sand, in hollows well known 

 to them traditionally, down to the hard substratum. Enlarging 

 the bottom of the boring as much as they can, by working their 

 pole on the slant, and then tying a small bunch of grass to a 

 long reed and inserting it in the hole, they suck up the water. 



1 Since writing the above I find this subject has been discussed by the 

 learned, and a decision arrived at unfavourable to the oryx ; but I let my re- 

 marks stand, for I do not know that anything has been said on the glyphs in 

 profile theory : the idea was first started in my mind by a conversation with, 

 the son of a late Bishop of Jerusalem. 



