Page:Seven Years in South Africa v2.djvu/83

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From Shoshong to the Great Salt Lakes.
53

after death; the flesh close round the wound is cut away, but all the rest is considered by the natives to be perfectly fit for food. Once, while in pursuit of some koodoos, one of Anderson’s people narrowly escaped running into an assegai-trap, being only warned by his servant just in time, and I have myself in the course of my rambles come upon several tracks stopped up in this way.

I wandered during the afternoon with the two traders a considerable distance down the hill to the north, crossing the Nokane and two other dry spruits more than once. On the way I noticed some aloes of unusual size, and some tiger-snails in the long grass in the valleys.

Early on the morning of the 18th we came to the south-east shore of the smallest and most southerly of the three of the great sait-lakes that I was able to visit. Away to the west this lake extended as far as the eye could see, and it took me two hours to travel the length of the eastern coast. It had an uniform depth of barely two feet, and presented a light grey surface edged with stiff arrow-grass, and surrounded by dense bush-forest, whilst round about it, in the very thickest of the grass, were considerable numbers of miniature salt-pans. It is scarcely once a year that it is full of water, for although after violent rains torrents stream down from all directions, very few of these make their way into the lake itself, but stagnate in another and deeper bed close by; the overflow of this, however, escapes into the lake. The name of this salt-pan is Tsitane, the same as that of the most important of the rivers flowing from the heights upon our left, which were the projecting spurs of the slope from the table-land to the