Page:Livingstone Popular Missionary Travels.djvu/43

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Chap. I.
THE HOPO.
21


you possess, though we are ignorant of them. You ought not to despise our little knowledge, though yon are ignorant of it.

This is a brief specimen of their mode of reasoning, which is often remarkably acute. I never succeeded in convincing a single individual of the fallacy of his belief, and the usual effect of discussion is to produce the impression that you yourself are not anxious for rain.

During this long-continued drought the women parted with most of their ornaments to purchase corn from more fortunate tribes. The children scoured the country in search of the numerous bulbs and roots which can sustain life, and the men engaged in hunting. Great numbers of buffaloes, zebras, giraffes, tsessebes, kamas or hartebeests, kokongs or gnus, pallas, rhinoceroses, &c., congregated at some fountains near Kolobeng, and the trap called "hopo" was constructed for their destruction. The hopo consists of two hedges in the form of the letter V. They are made very high and thick near the angle, where they do not however touch, and at the extremity is a pit six or eight feet deep, and twelve or fifteen in breadth and length. Trunks of trees are laid across the margins of the pit, and form an overlapping border, so as to render it almost impossible for the animal to leap out. The whole is carefully decked with short green rushes. As the hedges are frequently about a mile long, and about as much apart at the opening, a tribe which makes a circle round the country adjacent, and gradually closes up, is almost sure to sweep before it a large body of game. It is driven up with shouts to the narrow part of the hope, where men are secreted who throw their javelins into the affrighted herds. The animals rush to the narrow opening presented at the con- verging hedges, and fall into the pit. Some escape by running over the others, as a Smithfield market dog runs over the backs of the sheep. It is a frightful scene. The men, wild with excitement, spear the lovely animals with mad delight: others, borne down by the weight of their dead and dying companions, will every now and then make the whole mass heave by their struggles.

The Bakwains often killed between sixty and seventy head of large game at the different hopes in a single week; and as every one, both rich and poor, partook of the prey, the meat