The rivers of South-West Africa, like many others in South Africa, are
found, mostly, on the maps. Though the country is trenched by the beds
of many rivers, not a single perennial stream reaches the sea between
the Kunene and the Orange. On account of the great depth of its channel
below the adjacent land, the Orange is of no economic value to the
country. The Swakop, which has a total length of 250 miles, rises to
the east of the Damara highlands in the Waterberg and traverses the
plateau through deep, rocky gorges. Occasionally it flows into the sea
north of Walvis Bay. The Kuisip rises in the mountains beyond Windhoek
and intersects the Namib plain south of the Swakop to a depth of over
600 feet, but it rarely reaches the ocean. The last occasion on which
it pushed its way through to the Atlantic previous to the present year,
was in 1904. South of the Kuisip are other watercourses which are
arrested without even forming channels to the sea. During the greater
part of the year the Swakop and the Kuisip are non-existent as rivers;
a line of stunted willows or acacias, or, perhaps, a few muddy pools,
mark the river courses. After the storms, however, they are raging
torrents for a brief period, and immense volumes of water rush along
their beds.
The feeble, intermittent streams on the east of the divide fall for the
most part into the saline marshes of the Kalahari. The Fish River flows
south through Great Namaqualand, and sometimes reaches the Orange.
Lake Etosha in the north is a lagoon about sixty miles wide and fifty
miles in length. When full one or two rivers issue from it.
But water is not the scarce commodity that one might imagine it to be,
except, perhaps, in the Namib, for the springs or _fonteins_ are a
peculiar feature of the inner plateau. The most remarkable of these are
situated in a hill to the north of Windhoek. No less than five springs
issue from the limestone. They are all warm, and lie approximately in
a straight line at intervals of a few hundred yards apart. It is a
somewhat curious phenomenon that the temperatures vary considerably; a
difference of no less than 54°F. has been noted between one and two.
If the streams are all from the same source, as seems likely, they are
probably influenced in their passage to the surface by the geological
formation. Cold springs also exist in the limestone below the hot
springs. The waters of the warm spring at Warmbad, in South Great
Namaqualand, have strong sanative qualities. Centres so far distant
from each other as Bethanien, in the south-west, Omaruru, north-east of
Walvis Bay, and Gobabis, east of Windhoek, on the Kalahari border, also
have their springs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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