conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled The Lost World of the Kalahari about Africa, Kalahari, South with the genre: New, Used & Rental Textbooks, Humanities.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: From the time of his boyhood in South Africa, the author dreamed of finding the last of the disappearing mystical people of the Kalahari - the Bushmen. The opportunity finally came, and van der the author was able to organize an expedition into the interior of the desert, but the trip was not without its hazards, its disappointments, and its surprises. The Lost World of the Kalahari is a compelling, first-rate account of that grueling but ultimately successful journey through one of the most remote, primitive regions of Africa. For author and readers alike, this is an experience filled with both profound spiritual meaning and intense physical adventure. New York Herald Tribune: "I cannot recall a story more touched with fascination or more curious - in fact magical."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Lost World of the Kalahari
  On the northern front the Bushman fared no better. I hope some day a historian from among my black countrymen will not shirk the full implications of their share in the over-all tragedy. The traveller Chapman, for example, has several detailed stories of how Leshulatibi, a Bantu chief in Ngamiland, persecuted the Bushman. On one occasion when two of the chief's horses were suffocated in a bog, he bound the two Bushmen slaves in charge of them to the dead animals and thrust them back into the morass. Later, when another group of Bushmen carried off some of his cattle and vanished into the desert, he waited some months for revenge. Then he sent envoys with presents of tobacco and by various sustained acts of kindness lulled their suspicions and persuaded them to come to a great feast. There they were overpowered and brought to where he was sitting on a veld stool. From there he personally supervised the cutting of their throats, embellishing their last moments, it is said, by every taunt and sarcasm that came to his sinister imagination.
  But as a child what shocked me most was the realization of what we had done to the Bushman's children. If we pause to reflect, our justification for eliminating him is revealed as guiltladen hypocrisy in view of the extreme value we placed on his children. Everywhere they were in great demand as slaves because, when they survived captivity, they grew up into the most intelligent, adroit, and loyal of all the farmer servants. Even long after slavery was abolished and until the supply was dried up their service was exacted under a system of forced labour. From the earliest days, all along the frontier, the more desperate and adventurous characters among my countrymen added to their living by kidnapping Bushman children and selling them to the land- and labour-hungry farmers. Hardly a commando came back from an expedition without some children, and an early traveller speaks casually of seeing wagons full of children returning from a raid across the frontier. Many of the children died of the heart-ache, shock, and the suspension of the only rhythm their little lives had known. Many tried to escape and, if recaptured, were flogged heavily for their pains. Others, more fortunate, once clear of the settlers, would try furtively to signal by fires to their own people. If they saw no answering smoke in the land round about them, they would quickly extinguish the fire for fear of attracting the attention of their pursuers and move stealthily ever deeper into the interior. Then they would try to signal from another place. So it went on until they either found some people of their own race, or died of hunger, or were eaten by wild animals. Stow, who learned all this from Bushman survivors when the last act of the tragedy was barely over, suggests that far more children died than ever got through to safety. His description of their fate impressed me so deeply that sometimes as a boy, when I was alone on my pony below the hills at home where the Bushman had lived, I thought that the wind coming up behind me through the pass brought the fading voices of doomed lost children crying in the bleached grass between the ironstone boulders under an empty and unresponsive blue heaven.
  This hopeless situation reached its climax and declined swiftly into its fatal resolution between the years 1800 and 1860. Already at the beginning of this period the Bushman's extensive hold on Africa had shrunk to the country along the Great River, the southern and central water-points of what was to become the Orange Free State, and some of the steeper and deeper gorges of the Dragon ranges and their splintered spurs. He was still fighting back in tiny little pockets all over the veld but only in these areas did he retain some semblance of his former cohesion with his own kind and the other natural children of Africa. But about the year 1800 all that quickly changed. In that period pressure from the south reached its greatest force; in the north, its starkest brutality. A long process of demoralization of the spirit of the indigenous peoples of Africa was fast approaching its climax. Already, for centuries, human society in Africa had been society on the run. But in this period the whirlwind welter of migratory hordes having their violent way with weaker peoples, as well as the systematic raiding, year in and year out, deep into the heart of the continent by the pitiless slave trader from Zanzibar armed with powder and shot, produced a convulsion and disruption of human life and spirit on a scale not seen before. Terror, destruction, and disintegration, like the smell of the dead rotting on an apocalyptic battle field, stood high in the shining air. Almost every tribe of Africa picked up only what was negative in the situation. The weak lost the courage and wit that alone might have saved them and were ruled by blind terror. But they, too, whenever forced to flee into the country of someone even weaker than themselves, practised with all the ruthlessness of the convert the terror which had hitherto flayed them. The strong thought of little more than plundering and preying on the weak and making themselves ever stronger. Then they fell out among themselves, setting up rival combinations for loot and destruction.
  Great and fantastic figures began to appear and to agitate even more the fearful scene. Chaka, the terrible, the beautiful, the wisely yet madly inspired, the victim caught for all his magnificence and strength as a fly in the web of the spider spinning that terrible hour, arose to take the glittering Amazulu in hand and sent his crescent impis to burn and loot Africa from the Indian Ocean to the Zambesi, and from the Umbeni to the Great Lakes. How many perished we shall never know but the number has to be reckoned in tens of thousands. Even among his own followers the slaughter was immense. On the day of the death of his mother (whom like many conquerors he loved darkly and to excess) seven thousand people were killed so that she would have fitting company in the Hereafter: and for a year following her death every woman found to be pregnant was put to death with her husband. What showed up the tragic darkness of this hour even more was the glimmer of a strange subliminal honour and belief which clung to slaughter of this kind, like phosphorus to the tentacles of a giant octopus groping in the darkness of the oceans.
  After Chaka others crowded fast to ruin more thoroughly the world of crumbling spirit: Dingaan, Sikonyella, Moselikatse, of the Matabele off-shoot of the Amazulu, and the warrior-queen with thick, long, black hair who came like a comet in the night leading the dreadful hordes of Mantatees with their shields, spears, and battle-axes. For years, unafraid and invincible, they advanced from one Bantu settlement to another destroying all defenders and, after eating up grain and cattle, not staying to plant or husband but moving on, like locusts, to devour more.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: But Samutchoso was looking more at me, not the spoor. In the same tone of awe that he had used the evening before when I shot the lechwe, he said quietly, certain of his meaning: 'He knew you, Master. He recognized you and knowing you turned aside.'
  After that we tried to rest in the nearest shadows but the shade-loving tsetse fly soon drove us out to seek relief in the hot sun. I made no attempt to hunt because I was certain the alarm raised by the buffalo would have stampeded the game for many miles around. In fact we were hardly back in the open when a baboon, now thoroughly on the alert, spotted us and broadcast a loud warning to the bush below him. Instead we did a complete circuit of the island to look for signs of human occupation. We found none except, well above flood-water level, the remains of three ancient makorros, unlike our paddlers' of flat-bottomed design, slowly rotted and rotting in the grass.
  All this time I noticed that the nerves of my companions had been sorely tried by the encounter with the buffalo. Whenever a baboon frantically rattled a palm in the silence, or a foraging party of indefatigable termites dropped a dry limb from a dead tree to crash in the bush below, they started violently and appeared ready to run. They followed me into the dark main wood with reluctance, and sought the daylight beyond with the eagerness of a vivid apprehension. Their relief when we rounded the circle where we had left the makorros among the motionless rushes, and started back for camp, made them chant with joy as they bent down to take up their paddles. However, I lay on my back in the bottom of the craft, looking deeply up into the blue channel of the sky framed between the trembling reed tips above me, with my heart and mind still so much in the scene with the buffalo that I had no room even for the negative answer implicit in the rotting Bushman dug-outs on the island. I felt that the encounter had for a moment made me immediate, and had, all too briefly, closed a dark time-gap in myself. With our twentieth-century selves we have forgotten the importance of being truly and openly primitive. We have forgotten the art of our legitimate beginnings. We no longer know how to close the gap between the far past and the immediate present in ourselves. We need primitive nature, the First Man in ourselves, it seems, as the lungs need air and the body food and water; yet we can only achieve it by a slinking often shameful, back-door entrance. I thought finally that of all the nostalgias that haunt the human heart the greatest of them all, for me, is an everlasting longing to bring what is youngest home to what is oldest, in us all.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Watching them go, Ben said: 'They, too, will be off soon.' He waved his hand to the far south where a god-like head of thunder-cloud was beginning to send out lightning in the darkening sky.
  Remembering the untroubled expressions on the two wrinkled old faces it was almost more than I could bear to hear.
  I sat for some time by myself thinking over what he had told me. Life was only possible for all of us because, in our past, there had been those who had put the claims of life itself before all else. Did it really matter whether the end came from the crab within or the hyaena without? We will have the courage to meet it and give meaning to the manner of our dying provided we, like these humble, wrinkled old Bushmen, have not set a part of ourselves above the wholeness of life.
  We broke camp early the next morning, all the Bushmen, the women wearing their vivid new kerchiefs, crowding round our last fire to watch us. Their eyes, as they followed us, seemed uncomprehending and, to me, almost accusing. I know we all felt sad. I heard Vyan mutter to Ben: 'You know, an old hunter up north once said to me, "Wherever you camp in the bush you leave a part of yourself behind." I feel it more about this place than any other.'
  For once I moved off first because I wanted to get the break over quickly. Just before I got into my Land-Rover, 'Spoor of Gazelle' broke out of the bush, the kerchief round her neck streaming out like a flag of fire behind her, and ran up to put an ostrich egg full of water in my hand as I had so often seen her do to other hunters setting off on a long chase. 'Bowl of Food' (Nxou), 'Stone-axe' (Bauxhau), 'Powerful Wildebeest' (Tsexchi), and 'Lips of Fat' (Xhooxham) were sitting silenty beside the fire Watching us intenly. As I slammed the door of the car they all stood up and raised their hands as Nxou had done the evening I first met him. I drove past the silent huddle of little men and women all standing upright with hands raised above their heads. Waving to them I felt as if all my re-discovered childhood were dying within me. I drove up past the sip-wells to the high dunes behind them. On the crest I stopped, got out, and looked back. The remaining three Land-Rovers were just crossing the dry watercourse. Beyond them there was no smoke over our old camp, no visible sign of man or human habitation. The desert looked as empty as it had ever been. Yet in that vast world, behind the glitter of pointed leaves and in the miracle of sand made alive and thorn of steel set alight with flower by the rain, the child in me had become reconciled to the man. The desert could never be empty again. For there my aboriginal heart now had living kinsmen and a home on which to turn. I got back into my Land-Rover. I drove over the crest and began the long, harsh journey back to our twentieth-century world beyond the timeless Kalahari blue.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I drove over the crest and began the long, harsh journey back to our twentieth-century world beyond the timeless Kalahari blue.. I got back into my Land-Rover. For there my aboriginal heart now had living kinsmen and a home on which to turn. The desert could never be empty again. Yet in that vast world, behind the glitter of pointed leaves and in the miracle of sand made alive and thorn of steel set alight with flower by the rain, the child in me had become reconciled to the man. The desert looked as empty as it had ever been. Beyond them there was no smoke over our old camp, no visible sign of man or human habitation. The remaining three Land-Rovers were just crossing the dry watercourse. On the crest I stopped, got out, and looked back. I drove up past the sip-wells to the high dunes behind them. Waving to them I felt as if all my re-discovered childhood were dying within me. I drove past the silent huddle of little men and women all standing upright with hands raised above their heads. As I slammed the door of the car they all stood up and raised their hands as Nxou had done the evening I first met him. 'Bowl of Food' (Nxou), 'Stone-axe' (Bauxhau), 'Powerful Wildebeest' (Tsexchi), and 'Lips of Fat' (Xhooxham) were sitting silenty beside the fire Watching us intenly. Just before I got into my Land-Rover, 'Spoor of Gazelle' broke out of the bush, the kerchief round her neck streaming out like a flag of fire behind her, and ran up to put an ostrich egg full of water in my hand as I had so often seen her do to other hunters setting off on a long chase.'
  For once I moved off first because I wanted to get the break over quickly." I feel it more about this place than any other. I heard Vyan mutter to Ben: 'You know, an old hunter up north once said to me, "Wherever you camp in the bush you leave a part of yourself behind. I know we all felt sad. Their eyes, as they followed us, seemed uncomprehending and, to me, almost accusing.
  We broke camp early the next morning, all the Bushmen, the women wearing their vivid new kerchiefs, crowding round our last fire to watch us. Did it really matter whether the end came from the crab within or the hyaena without? We will have the courage to meet it and give meaning to the manner of our dying provided we, like these humble, wrinkled old Bushmen, have not set a part of ourselves above the wholeness of life. Life was only possible for all of us because, in our past, there had been those who had put the claims of life itself before all else.
  I sat for some time by myself thinking over what he had told me.
  Remembering the untroubled expressions on the two wrinkled old faces it was almost more than I could bear to hear.' He waved his hand to the far south where a god-like head of thunder-cloud was beginning to send out lightning in the darkening sky.Watching them go, Ben said: 'They, too, will be off soon