Twenty-Five Years in a Waggon in South Africa: Sport and Travel in South AfricaAnderson, Andrew A.
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Twenty-Five Years in a Waggon in South Africa: Sport and Travel in South Africa
Anderson, Andrew A.
Africa, Southern -- Description and travel; Anderson, Andrew A. -- Travel -- Africa, Southern
But Barber's pan is the most picturesque of all I have visited; this
also forms a kind of horse-shoe in shape. The outer banks are high on
the west, with bush and trees; the inner side is much lower, and thick
bush, and was always a favourite place for outspanning, and remaining a
few days for duck-shooting--and also the black and white geese, being a
secluded spot, seldom visited by the white or black man. Game as well
as birds could always be obtained, and plenty of wolves also. In
circumference it must be some fifteen miles. A few miles to the
north-east is another extensive pan, long but narrow. They both hold
water all the year round, as they are deep.
At Wolverfontein, where Mr. John Dunn has a pleasant farm situated near
the eye of the Moi river, upon which Potchefstroom is built, I visited
the limestone cave, which Mr. Dunn pointed out to me. This cave passes
underground for several hundred yards, and terminates at an underground
river, which flows to the north-east in a great stream, and is supposed
to come out at the eye of the Moi river, three miles away. Close to the
cave, in the high lime formation of a light-brown colour, the rock is
composed of one-half bones, teeth, entire jaws with the teeth in them,
belonging to some large animal, mixed with quartz rock. It is a strange
fact to find quartz so intimately mixed up with this limestone and
bones. I collected several fine specimens of bone imbedded in this
quartz and limestone mixture. One of the specimens of part of a jaw I
measured _in situ_. The bone, in which the teeth were perfect, measured
twelve inches, perfectly straight, sharply pointed at both ends, and one
and a quarter inch in the broadest part; the shape being exactly like a
canoe or some of the fast river-skiffs. A single row of eight teeth
down the middle, two of the centre ones being the largest, nearly an
inch square; the other three on each side were smaller, until the two
end ones measured a third of an inch square; they may have belonged to a
ruminant animal. The peculiar form of the bone the teeth were fixed in
I thought singular. I procured four similar specimens, two of the same
size, and two smaller, with several other pieces of rock, half
limestone, half quartz, in which are many perfect specimens of teeth and
bone.
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