Hi there. I'm a cryptozoologist, and I've spent the last five years researching African cryptids, particularly cases from the early 1900s. There's one encounter that keeps me up at night, something that happened in the Richtersveld back in 1907. The witness is long gone now, but his account still exists in historical records, and what he experienced down in those caves changed everything I thought I knew about what might be hiding in the deep places of this world. His name was Henrik Sawyer. He was a physician and prospector out of South Africa, well-educated, rational, not the type to make things up. In early 1907, he was searching for diamonds in the Northern Cape, specifically in the Richtersveld, this desolate region near the Orange River. The area was known for diamond deposits, but it was also known for something else. The Khoekhoe people who lived there had stories about a creature they called the Grootslang. Great snake, that's what it means in Afrikaans. They said it lived deep in the caves, guarding treasures, and that anyone who disturbed those caverns would pay with their life.
According to Sawyer's own written account, the locals warned him repeatedly. Don't go into the Wonder Hole, they said. That's what they called this particular cave system, the Wonder Hole, sometimes the Bottomless Pit. It was located about three miles from the Orange River, near Annisfontein spring. The Khoekhoe told him the cave descended straight down for sixty feet before branching off into god knows what. local warnings usually ends badly - Tom' They said the Grootslang lived down there, coiled around piles of diamonds, waiting. But Sawyer was a man of science. He'd heard plenty of local superstitions during his prospecting work, and he didn't put much stock in tales of guardian serpents. The diamonds were real, the geological surveys suggested as much. The monster, he figured, was just folklore. So in March of 1907, he gathered his equipment, a cable winch, an electric torch, rope, and he descended into the Wonder Hole alone.
The cave went down just like the locals had said. Sixty feet of vertical drop, then the passage leveled out and opened into a series of chambers. Sawyer described the air down there as thick and wrong, that's the word he used, wrong. There was a smell, pungent and musky, like nothing he'd encountered before. Not quite sulfur, not quite decay, something organic and ancient. The walls were damp, and his torch beam didn't penetrate very far. The darkness seemed to swallow the light. He moved deeper into the cave system, following what looked like natural tunnels that branched off in multiple directions. The floor was uneven, covered in bat guano and loose rocks. Then he reached a larger chamber, and that's when he saw it. At first he thought it was a rock formation, something massive and dark coiled against the far wall. But then it moved.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]