Front cover. In the middle of the folded envelope, printed in purple roneo ink:

Mr & Mrs Walter Battiss,

Giotto’s Hill

98 - 20th Street,

Menlo Park

PRETORIA

Postmarked: 6 VI 1962

Size: 26.5 x 21.5 cm

Front cover. Left side.

Baobab with branches??

Mopani

Chapters

1. Bush Fire. Yellow flowers. Z. Eloff

2. Mozelikatze

3. Mapungubwe

4. Captain Elton

5. Baines

6. Makabene & Bushmen & party of the witchdoctor

7. Elephant Hunts

8. Baobab dwelleo

9. Sita Diamond Mine

10. Copper

11. Night noises

12. Camp fire stories - animals - snakes - women

Front cover at the bottom, upside down: Edward Walker.

Front cover. Right side

In blue ballpoint: wrong key - Sybarite -

I have conjured up the whole history of Limpopo and its valley not from psychic manifestations, but rather from the frail evidences of the past which I shall placed before you as I unite this book.

These hints at history - erroneously but conveniently called prehistory - are for me sufficient to visualise the whole panorama of the past

Much of it I keep to myself, being considered Blasphemous, Immoral, Erotic, Pagan. These words are other names for Truth.

Today the Limpopo Valley is devoid of people. True there are some black ones and some white ones living a somewhat sad existence there, but the halcyon days, the days of the kingfisher, had many people living along the river.

Mapungubwe and the many other fortified zzz kopjes are decayed habitations of former prosperous & successful communities.

Back. Left side.

The yen I have had for the Limpopo for so long in due in part to my disgust for obvious places. A cold sweat grips my body when ever I see travel posters of Spanish or Italian German towns. They frighten me. Each wall a prison wall hiding skeletons. The windows are sinister eyes of dark cells hiding hidden histories of the Inquisition or the Reformation.

The Tower of London betrays the irony of those who advertise it. One comes out of the Tower with a sense of burden and guilt? I leave these obvious places to others for I have no lust for the Tower nor the million other places of fretful nightmares.

I go to the Limpopo to confirm an inner doubt. Apparently I go to see if I can find a certain serenity in nature yet knowing beforehand, having the doubt, that the Limpopo Valley is another vale

Back. Right side.

of insecurity.

Going to the Limpopo, doubting its magic, I yet find in the final disillusion, a new inner strength and power. The disillusion is not that the mysterious valley dos not exert a hypnotic influence - for it certainly hypnotises me - but the disillusion is my own inadequacy to live up to its rigid expectations of a Man. The exacting Limpopo Valley requires a man to have an austere love for nature, establishing a marriage of man’s ethos with nature’s ethos.

It requires the sage meditating in the silent of Mopane bush. Here sage is bush and water and sand and sand is sage.

Back. Flap.

I am not the sage, but a sort-of-a-kind-of artist who believes he has part of the prehistoric rock painter inside himself. Thus in identifying myself with the first painters of the sandstone rocks, I gather much comfort and health as I gather sticks for the camp fire’s glow.