The first description of the wonder of the Aughrabies Falls, one of the world’s six largest falls, was published 175 years ago
Stephen Gray
When George Thompson, the Cape-based trader, first beheld the awesome Aughrabies Falls, in the Northern Cape, in 1824 at the end of a long trek through iron-tinted rocky desolation, he was romantically struck with its powerful sublimity, its wild grandeur.
Soaked in spray and ever approaching the raging abyss, he had to be pulled back up the slithery slope by his terrified Korana guides.
Recovered from his dizzy rapture, he attempted to sketch the falls, but failed. At least he produced the first ever prose description. As an afterthought, he named it “King George’s Cataract”, just as David Livingstone would claim another African spectacle for a later British sovereign, Victoria.
But here the Nama name has stuck: !oukurabes, rendered as Aughrabies, which you will surely believe means the “place of the great noise”. Like some great ground bass, the falls keep making its strange music.
The first thing you learn about that seething cascade in the midst of its tranquil park, is that the bit about slippery slides is not exaggerated.
Were it not for the walkways and security fences, even more visitors would be drawn to their raging doom. Nor is the rhapsodic response overdone. I watched a huge Zulu tourist approach the thundering mouth and stand astounded; giving his chest a sore blow, he roared just the one exclamation: “Ah, Nature!”
The Aughrabies Falls is rated sixth in the world by volume, although only at rare flood-times do its 18 secondary cataracts and tributaries really come down. Still, the rapids in that endless gorge were sufficient for a recent Camel White Water championship, and rubber- ducking its boiling reaches has become a thrilling sport.
With Nico Schwartz, the park’s first social ecologist, I speculated if it could possibly be true that, as he claimed, Deneys Reitz – the famous author of Commando – had been the first man to cross under the big drop. He certainly did not walk over, as he hinted; the whirlpool beneath the main jet is 130m deep.
Could he have swum through, under the bulk of the Orange River, after its 56m crash? How could he have got down those gradients, fit only for multicoloured lizards and plunging Alpine swifts, let alone up the other side?
The poet C Louis Leipoldt is more reliable. He came botanising in 1936, finding new plant species at the rate of one a day in the surrounding Broken Veld. Then this was a farmer’s private domain but, in 1967, it was proclaimed a park, in which that wealthy heritage has been preserved.
Giraffe and desert black rhino are being reintroduced.