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Updated: June 24, 2025
Underneath this we crept, and each of us having drunk some water and eaten a bit of biltong, we lay down and soon were sound asleep. It was three o'clock in the afternoon before we woke, to find our bearers preparing to return. They had seen enough of the desert already, and no number of knives would have tempted them to come a step farther.
In these, with nothing visible but their peering eyes and the barrels of their rifles, the Boer marksmen crouched, and munched their biltong and their mealies as the day broke upon the morning of the 23rd. With the light their enemy was upon them. It was a soldiers' battle in the good old primeval British style, an Alma on a small scale and against deadlier weapons.
Well, we had our biltong together, and the Stranger put himself outside a good deal of the very little brandy I had left. We got yarning, so to speak, and I told him a few of the curious adventures that naturally fall to the lot of a man in those wild countries. The Stranger did not say much, but kept playing with a huge carved walking-stick that he had.
The flooring is made of cow-dung, into which peach stones are trodden at the threshold, in order to prevent its wearing away. The furniture consists of a deal table and some chairs, rather nearly made of strips of hide fastened to a wooden frame. There is no ceiling, but only beams, to which are fastened strips of "biltong," or game's flesh, dried in the sun.
Again Richard began to search, and this time produced from the pocket of his coat a long and thick strip of sun-dried meat. "Can you eat biltong?" he asked. "Of course," she answered eagerly. "Then you must cut it up," he said, giving her the meat and his knife. "My arm hurts me, I can't." "Oh!" she exclaimed, "how selfish I am. I forgot about that stick striking you. Let me see the place."
So I drank, and slept, and drank again, and later found strength and appetite sufficient to crawl back to where the dead horses lay, and to search among the scattered contents of my pack for some biltong, and the wherewithal to dress my wounds.
All that day we rode across rolling uplands, and about an hour before sunset halted at a little stream which ran down from a range of hills in front of us. By this time I was heartily tired of the biltong, so taking my elephant rifle for I had nothing else I left Tota with Indaba-zimbi, and started to try if I could shoot something.
During the war, while he was a member of the British War Cabinet and when Lloyd George leaned on him so heavily for a multitude of services, a young South African Major, fresh from the Transvaal, brought him a box of home delicacies. The principal feature of this package was a piece of what the Boers call "biltong," which is dried venison.
Have you anything to eat about you, baas?" As it chanced, in my saddle-bags I had some biltong that I had saved against emergencies. I gave it to him, and he devoured it as a famished hyena might do, tearing off the tough meat in lumps and bolting them whole. When it was all gone he licked his fingers and his lips and stood still staring at me. "Tell me your story," I repeated.
So having knee-haltered the horses in such fashion that they could not wander far, and turned them loose to feed, they sat down under a tree, and made some sort of a meal off the biltong and cooked corn which they had brought with them.
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