130 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 Cape oryx is called by the 
Arabs of to-day o) ‘reem.’! 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 
luhoshé,.a large tuber, and the bitter desert gourd ; if rain 
falls, or he comes across water, he drinks, no doubt, but he does Z 
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 toa 
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 ofa late Bishop of Jerusalem. 
Oe ETE OP) eS ee oe a ee een eee et eee 
