I 
May.] large PITS IN THE DESART. 17 
to vary the scene, which seemed forsaken both by 
birds and beasts. After travelling to the S.E. 
and clearing the dreary plain, we had a view of a 
distant range of hills in the vicinity of the Mala- 
lareen. At one p m. we passed t-\velve pits, 
arranged in the form of a crescent, each being 
about twenty feet long, ten broad, and five deep, 
besides the height of the earth thrown out of 
them. At the bottom of each large pit were two 
rows of smaller ones, nearly filled up. The 
design of these large excavations was no doubt to 
ensnare game ; laborious they must have been^ 
considering the feebleness of the instruments em- 
ployed by those who had made them. It appeared 
to be the work of the Tammahas, as we had met 
with nothing similar in any other country. It is 
probable they had been dug forty or fifty years, as 
a kurree tree of about that age was growing from 
the bottom of one of them. Fine yellow gravel 
was the only strata visible. Near those pits our 
people shot a springbok. 
At two p. M. we came to a small Bushman 
kraal, consisting only of four huts, and standing 
solitarily in the middle of a wilderness. The 
children with some women fled at our approach. 
They had lately killed a quacha, a leg of which 
our Matchappees obtained by urgent begging. 
Though they despise the poor Bushmen, and ge- 
nerally treat them with contempt, yet they did not 
VOL. II. c 
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