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Updated: June 22, 2025
Oswell "would be as determined as himself to get through the Desert." Before narrating the incidents of this journey, I may give some account of the great Kalahari Desert, in order that the reader may understand in some degree the nature of the difficulties we had to encounter.
We were then starting on the part of the desert which Duveyrier calls the Tassili of the south, and which figures on the maps of the Minister of Public Works under this attractive title: "Rocky plateau, without water, without vegetation, inhospitable for man and beast." Nothing, unless parts of the Kalahari, is more frightful than this rocky desert.
Those on the seaboard of both the east and west are very dark; then two bands of lighter color lie about three hundred miles from each coast, of which the westerly one, bending round, embraces the Kalahari Desert and Bechuana countries; and then the central basin is very dark again. This opinion is not given with any degree of positiveness.
Knowing that the latter would rather have fled to the Kalahari Desert than deliver up their weapons and become slaves, I proceeded to the commandant, Mr. Gert Krieger, and, representing the evils of any such expedition, prevailed upon him to defer it; but that point being granted, the Boer wished to gain another, which was that I should act as a spy over the Bakwains.
At first I was ordered to Kanya, a mission-station some seventy miles away, an oasis in the Kalahari Desert. This plan gave rise to a paragraph which I afterwards saw in some of the daily papers, that I had left Mafeking under the escort of a missionary, and some cheery spirit made a sketch of my supposed departure as reproduced here.
Having watered the cattle at a well called Lobotani, about N.W. of Bamangwato, we next proceeded to a real Kalahari fountain, called Serotli. The country around is covered with bushes and trees of a kind of leguminosae, with lilac flowers. The soil is soft white sand, very trying to the strength of the oxen, as the wheels sink into it over the felloes and drag heavily.
But even this contingency was foreseen by the Omniscient One; for, as we may now observe in the Kalahari Desert, another family of plants, the mesembryanthemums, stood ready to neutralize the aridity which must otherwise have followed.
Out of the long defiles and valleys we threaded our way into the open country, past the huge flat-topped mountains of Ombokoro, the fastness of the Berg Damaras, thence following the dry river-bed of the Om- Mafako north-east to the confines of the Omaheke desert that great north-western outlier of the true Kalahari not far, indeed, from this very spot!
The country after that is still called Picardy or Belgium, still has its old name on the map as though it smiled there yet, sheltering cities and hamlet and radiant with orchards and gardens, but the country named Belgium or whatever it be is all gone away, and there stretches for miles instead one of the world's great deserts, a thing to take its place no longer with smiling lands, but with Sahara, Gobi, Kalahari, and the Karoo; not to be thought of as Picardy, but more suitably to be named the Desert of Wilhelm.
Three principal zones of habitation appear: first, the steppes and deserts around the Sahara in the north and the Kalahari desert in the south; secondly, the grassy highlands bordering the Great Lakes and connecting these two regions; thirdly, the forests and rivers of Central and West Africa. In the deserts are the nomads, and the Pygmies are in the forest fastnesses.
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