64 KLOOF AND KARROO. 



Next morning, after discharging our reckoning, 

 we prepared to complete the six miles that remained 

 before reaching our destination in Naroekas Poort. 

 We crossed the drift, which in the morning light 

 looked even more ugly than we had thought it in 

 the darkness of the preceding night, and then went 

 up the pass that lay between two precipitous 

 and forbidding walls of mountain. This grim 

 Swanepoels Poort was, as we afterwards learnt, 

 one of the last strongholds of the untamed Bush- 

 men south of the Karroo. Up in the rocks that 

 tower above it are their caves and fastnesses, and 

 there may yet be seen the remains of their pictorial 

 art — the strange presentments of the various beasts 

 of the chase. Swanepoels Poort, which gives access 

 from the Eastern Karroo, and the Eastern frontier of 

 the Colony, to the Western province, was formerly 

 on the main route of travel. The Bushmen, 

 perched secure in these mountain eyries, and 

 armed with poisoned arrows, were a constant source 

 of danger and annoyance to travellers passing 

 through ; and, moreover, they harried the flocks of 

 the neighbouring farmers incessantly. But one day, 

 about the year 1830, Sir Andries Stockenstrom, 

 Lieutenant-Governor of the Eastern province, one 

 of the finest specimens of the colonial warrior and 

 statesman, and rightly created a baronet for his 

 manful and most eminent services in the old frontier 

 wars, as well as in time of peace, passed through 

 the poort with a considerable retinue. In his turn, 

 annoyed by the Bushmen marauders still lingering 

 there, he heard from a Boer living just outside the 

 pass of their many misdeeds. " Well," said Sir 

 Andries, "if you like to raise a commando and 



