The Lost World of the Kalahari Read Online Free Page A

such a way that the bees were not disturbed. He knew how to calm and secure a swarm on the wing, and his nests were passed down from father to son. One of the many tragic sights of the closing phase of his history in the country wherein I was born, was the reappearance, at odd moments, in the bed and valleys of the Great River of some wrinkled old Bushman body come from afar to harvest the honey passed on to him by a line of ancestors, only to be shot down in his efforts by some Griqua or European invader. Indeed the taste of the honey on his tongue drove the Bushman to do many reckless things. He would scale great cliffs to get at honey in places where only ‘the people who sit on their heels’ (as is his dignified name for the baboons) would dare to go. I had one such place pointed out to me which I would not have attempted without rope and climbing boots. Yet the Bushman had climbed it regularly on bare hands and feet, driving pegs of wood for a grip into the fissures of the cliff-face. At the top he had only a narrow ledge on which to stand while he made his special herbal smoke to drug the bees before he dared reach out for the honey in the hole in the damp overhanging rocks. For the wild bees of Africa are the most formidable bees I have ever encountered. They are smaller than most but quick, fearless, and quite unpredictable. In the village where I was born no hive was allowed by special by-law within four miles of the township because one sleepy summer’s afternoon all the bees had carried out a combined operation against everything that moved in the streets and sun-filled courtyards and paddocks. I have forgotten the precise extent of the casualty list but I remember there were two little coloured boys, pigs, hens, sheep, goats, dogs, and several horses among the dead. To this day they, the mosquito, and the tsetse fly, are among the stoutest defenders of ancient rights in Africa. They resent strangers, black as much as white. But for the Bushman they had no such antipathy. They appear to have known from his colour and his smell that he too was part of the necessity of Africa and to have stung him only perfunctorily, as if merely to save their sensitive, jet-eyed, and oddly oriental little faces.
    Whenever some disaster overwhelmed his bees the Bushman would set out to look for a new swarm. He would be up early in the morning hoping to find the black water-carrier bees among the dew, and with his eyes would follow them and their silver burden in the slanted light back to their base. Or he would stand still in some fragrant spot at sunset comforted by the tall shadow beside him, and wait for an illumination of wings to draw a bee-line home. It was quite unbelievable, my aunt said, how far those slanted, oddly Mongolian eyes of his could follow the flight of a bee. Long after the European or black man lost sight of it he would still be there marking the flight. When he failed to follow the bee he would go to the spot where the bee had vanished, mark the place, returning the next day and thereafter as long as was necessary to determine the exact whereabouts of the swarm. But most wonderful of all, he had an ally in a little bird called ‘ Die Heuning-wyser ’, the honey-diviner, who loved honey as much as did the Bushman. It always had its bright little eyes wide open for a nest and whenever it found a swarm at work it would come streaking back, its little wings whirring and starry in the shadows of the trees, to tell the Bushman of its discovery.
    â€˜Quick! Quick! Quick! Honey! Quick!’ it would sing at the Bushman from the nearest bush, flapping its wings imperiously in the trembling air. ‘Quick! Quick!’
    At once the Bushman would understand the bird’s excited chatter and hasten to reassure it with a melodious call of his own: ‘Look, oh, person with wings! Gathering my things and following thee quickly I come.’
    When at last he had drawn his amber ration he would