The broken string

the long version

"The first people of South Africa, Stone-Age hunters and gatherers from the mountains and the arid flats of the interior, did not survive the arrival of settlers from Europe. Within decades an ancient world of sorcerers, hunters and artists was lost for ever, along with the stories they told." "We would know next to nothing of their myths, their beliefs or the rituals that governed their lives if it were not for six bushmen, five of whom had been sentenced to hard labour in a Cape Town prison in 1869. Released into the country home of a Prussian linguist called Wilhelm Bleek and his English-born sister-in-law, a former governess called Lucy Lloyd, they were invited to teach their language and to share a previously unknown world on the verge of extinction." "Over the next eighteen years Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd worked together to record 12,000 pages of stories, songs, pictures and moving personal histories. The notebooks answer questions about ancient rock art, describe the awful tragedy of a vanished people and tell us something about the long story shared by everyone alive today - but they also tell a remarkable story of their own."--BOOK JACKET.