In many of the Bushman caves the head of the oryx is scratched in profile, and in that position one horn hides the other entirely. In Syria, even up to the present day, I am told, a very near relation of the _Oryx capensis_ is found; it is the habit of man in his hunting stage to try his hand at delineating the animals he lives upon. Probably the rocks or caves of Syria may show, or formerly may have shown, glyphs of the oryx resembling the work of the African Bushmen, and an early traveller may easily have taken them for representations of an animal with one horn, and have started the idea of the unicorn, Biblical and heraldic. With regard to the former, the word in the Hebrew in our version rendered unicorn is ‘reem’; in some old English Bibles, indeed, ‘reem’ has been preserved in the text untranslated. Again, I am told that the Syrian congener of the Cape oryx is called by the Arabs of to-day ريم ‘reem.’[9] Is it not likely then, that the Biblical Unicorn is the same as the ‘reem’ of the Arab? As an heraldic beast, the gemsbok lends himself most gallantly to the theory; he is a strongly marked equine antelope, and is the one of his family that frequently lowers his head to show fight, it is said even with the lion--and this is confirmed in song, though he certainly got the worst of it in poetry, as I very much think he would in real life. The gemsbok is scarce, and hardly met with save in the barren open stretches of country like the Bakalahari desert; there were more near the colony in my day than further in. He can do without water for a long time certainly--indeed I believe altogether. He digs and eats watery roots such as luhoshé, a large tuber, and the bitter desert gourd; if rain falls, or he comes across water, he drinks, no doubt, but he does not need it to support life. His country is also the stronghold of the Bushmen, who can, as I have said before, live for months under the same conditions, but who generally obtain water by boring with a long pole through the sand, in hollows well known to them traditionally, down to the hard substratum. Enlarging the bottom of the boring as much as they can, by working their pole on the slant, and then tying a small bunch of grass to a long reed and inserting it in the hole, they suck up the water. These maminas, or sucking holes, are common throughout the desert, and wherever we found the reeds we found water; in two instances, indeed, by digging to a depth of nine feet we were enabled to supply all our horses and oxen, for though the water never stood more than eight or ten inches, yet the oftener the well was emptied the quicker it filled again, obstructions to its free flow being removed by the continuous trickling. [Illustration: Maneless lions]