176 DAMARAS ARE BAD GUIDES. [chap, vl 



side, and along their foot a considerable sheet of water 

 ajipeared to have lain in the rainy seasons. The guide 

 recognised the place as the station he had wanted to 

 take us to, and promised that there should now be no 

 further mistakes. 



April 29th. — We went on, and after straying for 

 three and a half hours, came again to a'nonplus; we 

 had cleared the mountains, and a thick mass of shrubs 

 lay before us. The guide had been following an old 

 elephant, or some other wild beast path, instead of the 

 Ovampo track. I made him chmb a pretty stiff hill 

 with me, the cactus and broken stones of which he did 

 not at all like, — but it was of no use to us. A wide 

 forest extended below, without a landmark, so we came 

 down and returned to Otchikango. 



The Damaras are bad guides considering that they 

 are savages, and ought to have the instincts of locaUty 

 strongly developed. On subsequent occasions, in 

 retracing om* routes over wide extents of country, it 

 was a common amusement to try each other's recollec- 

 tion of the road b}'' asking what would be the next 

 object or next tm-n of the path that we should come 

 to. But it is difficult to compare a European's idea of 

 a country with that of these savages, as they look at it 

 in such different ways, and have their attention 

 attracted to such entii-ely different objects. A Damara 

 never generalises ; he has no one name for a river, but a 

 different name for nearly every reach of it ; thus the 

 Swakop is a Namaqua name ; there is no Damara word 

 for it. A Damara who knew the road perfectly from 

 A to B, and again from B to C, would have no idea of 



