Page:Lake Ngami.djvu/188

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
180
OTJIKOTO FOUNTAIN.

After a day and a half travel we suddenly found ourselves on the brink of Otjikoto, the most extraordinary chasm it was ever my fortune to see. It is scooped, so to say, out of the solid limestone rock, and, though on a thousand times larger scale, not unlike the Elv-gryta one so commonly meets in Scandinavia. The form of Otjikoto is cylindrical; its diameter upward of four hundred feet, and its depth, as we ascertained by the lead-line, two hundred and fifteen—that is,

OTJIKOTO FOUNTAIN.

at the sides, for we had no means of plumbing the middle, but had reason to believe the depth to be pretty uniform throughout. To about thirty feet of the brink it is filled with water.[1]

  1. Shortly before reaching "Baboon Fountain" I should remark that, at a place called Orujo, we saw a cavity of a similar shape, though on an infinitely smaller scale. It consisted of a circular-shaped basin in the limestone rock ninety feet in diameter by thirty in depth. As it