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NIEU-BETHESDA NEWS - Nieu-Bethesda woke up to beautiful blanket of whiteness on Saturday morning, 8 September.
With the snow came silence.
Birds held their songs close to their puffed out chests, and soft, fat, dry flakes added to the frosting that sifted over the village throughout the day.
The blue-white snow of the dawn lured the brave out into the hills. A message on a teenager’s phone read, “Dude! What the flip! It’s like the movies!” The substantial snowfall literally transformed everything that was familiar in the Karoo to a totally different landscape.
The usual ombré tones of browns and yellows became a play on a hundred shades of whiteness which contrasted with the remnant darkness of winter trees and vegetation.
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It is said that the Inuits have hundreds of different words for snow. This claim is somewhat controversial, but Phil James’ list of ‘snow words’ includes the following:
“tlapa -powder snow; Kayi - drifting snow; Tlamo – snow that falls in large wet flakes; blotla – blowing snow and tslaslo – snow that falls slowly”, to name but a few. In South Africa we have our own debates when it comes to the naming of the icy precipitation that delights us so! According to George Pietersen of Snow Report, “I have always been told that SNOW is a round puffy ball, almost like hail, just softer, and that KAPOK is the feathery flake type. Others confirm that kapok is icy sleet, whereas SNEEU is snow.
Elsa Wessels adds, “According to my latest research on Kapok and Sneeu, there is actually no difference. It just depends on which format it may occur, be it sleet and ice rain or as the soft, feathery ‘cotton ball’ stuff. But it is still just snow. In historic times, the Cape Malay people did not know snow, and immediately compared it with their knowledge of tropical plants like cotton – ‘kapok’ means small, which is also why the small little bantam fowls also became known as kapokhoenders.”
Regardless of what it is called, Karoo people experienced a wonderful variety of the various forms of snow that fell last Saturday. In places around the Compassberg and the high lying areas around Nieu-Bethesda, the snow lay as deep as 20cm. Freshly shorn sheep stared quite shocked through fences frosted with snow. Farmers were on high alert regarding their livestock, but temperatures were not particularly low that day. Animals behave differently in the snow. Birds seem heavy and quiet, and fly quite low, hiding beneath bushes.
Dogs cavort and delight in their new playgrounds and seem to take no heed to cold paws and noses! In a copse below Compassberg a small herd of wild horses whinnied into the forest, their black manes shaking off snowflakes. Higher up, a group of mountain rheebok, peered into the valley, no longer so camouflaged, their perfectly parallel black horns suddenly in sharp contrast to the whiteness around them. And all the while a steady bank of moisture soaks down into the parched earth and tributaries and valleys below - bringing some relief to the dry Karoo.
This weekend’s widespread snow will go down in the memory banks of so many for years to come.
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