The modern Bushman is singled out from other African races by his extraordinary gift for delineating and painting. He has painted or engraved many pictures on the rocks in past times, illustrating thus his customs, superstitions, battles, and above all the wild animals of which he has long been an adroit and fearless hunter. No existing tribe of true negro stock has possessed such a gift for drawing or such a desire to display it. To find some parallel to the artistic work of the Bushmen we must cross the Zambezi and travel northwards to the Sahara desert between Lake Chad and the northernmost Niger on the one hand and the coast regions of Algeria on the other. In all this vast region of desert or stony plateau there are many engravings and pictures on the rocks; but from such slight indications as we possess (some of them are so ancient that they depict extinct beasts) we are inclined to attribute them to a primitive white race, to some such people as covered the walls of caverns in France and Spain with splendid pictures of bison, horses, mammoths, reindeer, salmon, eels, lions, ibexes, and boars. So far no examples of Bushman paintings have been discovered in the far west of South Africa or to the north of the Zambezi. Yet there is some slight traditional and historical evidence to show that Bushmen still lingered in Nyasaland and in the interior of Moçambique down to a period of perhaps three hundred years ago. Another distinguishing mark of the Bushman type is its peculiar language. This is almost unwritable, so much is it compounded of inarticulate and beast-like sounds—clicks with the tongue, gasps, and nasal grunts. There is very little discoverable syntax in Bushman speech. Its peculiar phonology is shared to some extent by the Hottentot; but, on the other hand, Hottentot has a well-marked syntax as clearly defined as that of any European language, and discriminates between the masculine, feminine and neuter genders. In short in its construction and grammar it recalls very markedly the Hamitic language family of north-east Africa; and there is—remarkable to relate—a language, the Sandawi of German East Africa, south of the Victoria Nyanza, which resembles Hottentot in possessing clicks and also in a few of its word-roots, and in its syntax. This speech is used by a semi-nomadic tribe of hunters, who, however, in physique seem to be negroid with some tinge of Hamitic blood.