The Richtersfeld Nature Reserve is located in the northwest of South Africa in the Northern Cape Province. This is a mountainous and desert area, overgrown with rare shrubs, among which the Nama tribe has been wandering for 2 thousand years, practically without changing the primitive way of life.
Nama graze cows and live in light, mobile huts. According to one of their legends, somewhere in these places there is an underground cave called “bottomless pit”. Allegedly, this cave is so long that it even goes out to the ocean and once upon a time, countless treasures were hidden in it, including diamonds.
But according to the same legend, finding the entrance to this cave is not the most difficult task. It is more difficult to deal with the monster guarding the cave - a huge snake that attacks anyone who dares to enter.
The legend of the cave and the snake is so full of varied details that it seems like more than just a myth.
This snake in a local mixture of Afrikaans and Dutch is called Grootslang or Grot Slang. They say that she is as old as the world and the Gods created her, endowing the snake with tremendous strength, cunning and powerful intellect.
The snake is about 15-20 meters or more in length, and its scales are "black as night". It is sometimes described as a creature with a long neck, a long serpentine tail and an elephant-like body (similar to a dinosaur like a diplodocus), but more often as just a huge snake.
Woe to the one who tries to enter the cave and pick up the treasure, the snake will tear it into small pieces or eat it. But sometimes the snake leaves its cave and crawls around the neighborhood, including it was allegedly seen in the Orange and Vaal rivers.
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In 1867, explorer Hans Sawyer saw a huge black snake over 30 meters long! The snake floated down the Orange River in the Aliwal North region of the Northern Cape. And in 1899, the merchant Kinnear was crossing the Orange River in the Upington area by boat, when suddenly a huge snake head on a long black neck protruded out of the water very close to the boat.
Some very interesting observations were made by a South African adventurer and prospector named Fred S. Cornell. In 1910, on an expedition down the Orange River, Cornell camped near the Augrabis Falls.
Soon one of the American members of his expedition named Kammerer came running to him and he was very frightened. Kammerer said that he went to swim and suddenly next to him to a height of almost 4 meters stretched a snake head on a long neck.
The second case was in 1920 and Cornell detailed it in his long-titled book, The Glamor of Prospecting: Wanderings of a South African Prospector in search of copper, gold, emeralds, and diamonds.
In 1945, journalist Lawrence Greene, in his book Where Men Still Dream, described that local tribes flatly refused to go down into one of the mines next to the river for fear of the Grutslang. However, he managed to find one person who descended into this cave.
In more recent years, no new reports from the huge snake have appeared, or they have not reached the press.