The Lost World of the Kalahari Read Online Free Page B

never fail to reward the bird with honey and, on a point of mutual honour, share with it the royal portion of the harvest: a comb as creamy as the milk of Devon with its own cream made of half-formed grubs.
    And there I must leave them in this moment of fair exchange and communion. I shall return later to the Bushman’s relationship with the bees and birds and the significant role which honey, and the bubbling mead he made from it, plays in his spirit. But this seemed to belong here because it came to me in the very beginning, breaking out of the darkness of the past like moonsparkle blown by the night wind from some startled water, a portion of the glory the Bushman trailed in his nakedness from the God and Africa that were his home.
    Now one of the many arguments used by his enemies to show that this little hunter and seeker after honey was really a very inferior person, was precisely the fact that he was utterly dependent on nature. He built no home of any durable kind, did not cultivate the land, and did not even keep cattle or other domestic chattel, and this seemed to prove to his enemies that he was a human ‘untouchable’ and not far removed from the beasts of the veld. The Hottentot, a devout pastoralist, the Bantu who was both pastoralist and tiller of the soil, and of course the white man were all rated much higher than the Bushman. Now it is true that the shelters the Bushman built for himself when on the move after game were of the lightest possible structure. Home, for the greater part of the year, was wherever he made a major kill. None the less he had a permanent base on which his whole life swung. In my own part of the country he built round walls of stone, on top of the hills near his permanent waters. The walls were from four to five feet high and according to the local tradition without opening or roof of any kind. At night he would merely climb over the wall, light a fire and cook his food out of the wind, and then curl up by the coals under a blanket of skin. Long after he had vanished from the land it was possible to see, within some crumbling circle of stone, the scorched earth and blackened pebbles where his fires had burnt for centuries. Close by was the hollow he had scratched in the ground to ease the lying for his hips and which was the only bed he ever inherited from his fathers, or passed on to his sons.
    I was shown the site of such a permanent base as soon as I could scramble up a hill. It was on the top of the hills at the back of the homestead on my grandfather’s immense farm. The lovely place was made more attractive for me by its evocative name: ‘Boesmansfontein’ – the fountain or spring of the Bushman. This name it possessed already when my grandfather bought the property, so lightly, from its Griqua robbers nearly a century ago, and is enough to show that the fountain once was the permanent water of a Bushman. It came gushing out of the earth in a cleft over-grown and purple with the shadow of blue-bush, Karreetree, wild poplar, and African willow. It was unique among the springs in the area because it gushed simultaneously out of what we called ‘Three-eyes’, that is to say it had three distinct round openings for the urgent crystal water. The water was sweet and bubbled in the light with a noticeable rhythm as if somewhere within the earth a caring heart was beating to pump it up to us. As a child who had participated already from birth in my native country’s perennial anxieties about water I never looked at it without feeling that I was in the presence of an Old Testament miracle. Yet, more unusual still, barely a quarter of a mile away the water of the spring joined naturally with other permanent waters in the bed of a stream always musical with bird-song and well clothed in silky reeds and tasselled rushes. This stream had the provocative name of ‘Knapsack River’, but it remains one of the minor disappointments of my life that I