2 MUTILATED VICTIM. [chap. hi. 



with their knob kerries, and struck them till they were 

 nearly insensible, and then hacked at their necks with 

 their assegais. This one was left for dead, but he 

 recovered, and succeeded in crawling from under the 

 thorn bush to where he was found. The tenacity of 

 life in a negi'o is wonderful. The object of the murder 

 proved to be simply this — The tlrree Damaras had 

 found cattle belonging to their werft but not to them- 

 selves ; they were hungry and killed an ox to have a 

 good gorge, and then, not knowing how to get out of 

 the scrape of having killed their friends' cattle, they 

 determined to lay the guilt upon these two unhappy 

 men, and therefore murdered them. It would never 

 do to leave this man to die where he was, so I went 

 with water, a litter and some bandages. The first 

 man's throat was cut quite through, and he had long 

 been dead ; the second man I found under the shadow 

 of a tree with his head between his two hands on his 

 knees and insensible, but we roused him up, his lips 

 were cracked with thirst and he could not speak. I 

 could never have believed that a man with a wound like 

 this could have survived an hour ; all the back sinews 

 of his neck were severed to the bone, and the cut 

 went quite round his neck, but only skin deep near 

 the jugular vein and windpipe. The head was perfectly 

 loose upon his shoulders, and heavily bruised, and his 

 skin was torn with the hakis thorns. I put him on 

 the litter, but his head rolled so shockingly from side 

 to side as the litter moved that I was obliged to make 

 two cushions of grass, one on each side of his head, to 

 steady it. At Barmen he was not able to give any 



