Chapter XIX. 



THE RISE AND FALL OF UPINGTONIA. 



A Frontier Drama. 



SOME few years ago an expedition set out from 

 the north-west border of the Transvaal, which 

 attracted great local attention at the time- 

 On the banks of the Limpopo, or Crocodile River, 

 there lay, outspanned, many a stout waggon and 

 many a yoke of oxen, which carried some seventy 

 or eighty families of Dopper Boers, with their goods 

 and fortunes. The Doppers are a sect holding 

 religious views more severe and savage even than 

 those of the Calvinists of old. They look upon the 

 natives in exactly the same light as did the 

 wandering Israelites, as mere hewers of wood and 

 drawers of water, and they treat them invariably 

 with merciless severity and even barbarity, for they 

 truly believe that they have " the heathen for an 

 inheritance." These hardy trekkers were proceeding 

 in search of what they called " the promised land," 

 which was in reality a rich territory in Ovampoland, 

 far to the north-west of Lake N'Gami and the river 

 systems of that region. 



A year or so passed by after their departure, and 

 at length fitful news began to leak through from the 

 interior of sad disasters to those Boer trekkers. It 

 became known, finally, that after long and weary 

 journeying through the arid doorst-land (thirst-land). 



