Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/41

Rh be hardly possible to express in fewer words a description of the Bushman race.

But that is not all he related of the pygmies. He had been informed that five young Nasamonians, actuated by a spirit of inquiry and adventure, had set out on a journey of exploration from the coast of the country now called Tripoli, and having travelled first to the south and then to the west through the inhabited parts and the desert, reached a territory where they were made prisoners by men of small stature. These conducted them through extensive marshes to the bank of a great river flowing from west to east, in which were crocodiles. All the people they saw were pygmies, black in colour, addicted to magic, and speaking a language unintelligible to the Nasamonians. How the travellers escaped we are not told, but they succeeded in retracing their steps, and reached their homes again in safety. Probably the river which was the terminus of their journey was the Niger, a stream which baffled the curiosity of Europeans down to 1830, when it was traced to its mouth by the brothers Richard and John Lander. Herodotus believed it to be the upper course of the Nile, which he thought must flow for a great distance from west to east, as otherwise he could not account for the great volume of water in it.

In 1849 the traveller Barth on his way southward from Tripoli discovered many ancient engravings on rocks in a valley near Murzuk in Fezzan, approximate latitude 26° north, longitude 14° east of Greenwich. He has given copies of three of these, though they cannot be regarded as absolutely correct, as two are from sketches and the other from memory only. But they are unmistakably of the same class as Bushman engravings, the oxen represented being fairly well outlined, but without feet, as in South Africa, and the men having the heads of animals. Barth noticed that there were no engravings of camels, beasts of burden unknown there until long after the introduction of the ox, from which it may be assumed that these engravings were made at a time