Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/75

Rh of capturing the smaller kinds, and speared the huge barbels and yellow fish with harpoons of bone.

Honey was obtained in many localities in large quantities. The bees frequently make their hives in crevices in the faces of precipices, but it was a very lofty precipice that a Bushman would not scale or be lowered down from above to secure the spoil. A peg driven into a crack in the rock or any little projecting ledge gave him a foothold, and no baboon would venture where he feared to go. The comb was used for food, but most of the honey was fermented and consumed as an intoxicant. The Bushmen were inveterate smokers of dacha or wild hemp, a plant widely distributed in South Africa, and which possesses great intoxicating properties.

Their principal weapons were bows and arrows, but when hard pressed by an enemy and in the chase they used anything that came to hand, stones for throwing, sticks, darts, stone-headed spears, or anything else that could be improvised. The bows were nothing more than pieces of saplings or branches of trees scraped down a little and strung with a cord formed by twisting together the sinews of animals. It was thus almost useless in wet weather, as the cord when damp was liable to relax, so at such times the Bushmen never went abroad. The arrows were made of reeds, pointed generally with bone, but sometimes with chipped stone flakes. The arrowhead and the lashing by which it was secured to the reed were coated with a deadly poison, so that the slightest wound caused death. The arrows were carried in a quiver usually made of the bark of a species of euphorbia, which is still called by Europeans in South Africa the kokerboom or quiver tree. They were formidable chiefly on account of the poison, as they could not be projected with accuracy to a distance of over fifty metres, and from their frailty had in general little penetrating power. The most expert Bushmen were able to discharge arrows in very rapid succession and at short distances with a fairly accurate aim.

They—or at least some of them—were acquainted with antidotes to the poisons which they used, but were very careful not to inflict wounds upon themselves or even to allow the deadly