Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Night Adder in Cage with Proportionally Largest Venom Sacs
I once had a challenging episode in the Drakensberg Mountains many years later. On the last
rope climb with my brother we climbed Sentinel Peak. I became stuck in the Chimney and
could go no further and by brother and his friend Foxy had to pull me up. What a relief to get to
the top and the view was incredible, looking down some 7,000 feet. We then went abseiling
down the ropes. The problem with mountain climbing is that when you reach the summit one
has a great sense of relief and relaxes and that is probably why 90% of injuries occur not when
climbing up but when coming down. The same seems to occur with big game hunters. They
shoot some animal like an elephant, there is a great sense of relief and they relax too much and
suddenly the elephant or buffalo get up and suddenly kills them. A week later my brother was
in a fatal motor vehicle accident.
In the numerous caves of the Drakensberg are some of the richest and diverse paintings by
San Bushmen in the world, thought to be not quite as old as those of Apollo caves in Namibia
that are dated to some 25- 27,000 years ago.
Patricia Vinnicombe and David Lewis-Williams, the latter a Kearsney teacher and former
professor at University of Witwatersrand who would also take his students to the
Drakensberg, put forward the theory that all the paintings, rather than records of hunts, were
paintings of visions and religious experience. Mostly the therianthropes depict eland but
sometimes elephants (see later photo of elephant painting), perhaps because they represented
water or potency because their meat was red, black or white. Africans of Botswana and
Zimbabwe according to Gordon-Cumming and Livingstone killed elephants mainly for meat
not ivory and bushmen clearly also hunted elephants. The belief about eland is partly based on
an interview with one of the last known San Bushmen cave painters in the area at Witsies
Hoek, on the western side of the Amphitheatre, where the rock face of Sentinel plunges some
7,500 feet vertically down to the Tugela River below.
The painter said that San paintings were of eland because they, the San, are people of the
Eland and in trances they would have out of body experiences.
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