Dorothea Bleek and fellow teacher Helen Tongue made this observation, probably in the summer of 1905–1906, during a trip through the mountains of south-eastern southern Africa. The young women were on a rock art copying expedition that had brought them to this cave in the Malotis. They followed, in some instances, in the footsteps of George Stow, who had trod nearby ground with a similar mission in mind some 40 years earlier. What they saw on the rock walls before them underlined the urgency of their task. In the co-published book published just four years later, Dorothea wrote of the damage that had been done to the painting, commenting that ‘native herd boys have chipped at these paintings with stones, wherever they could reach them, and spoilt them, as no mere rubbing of sheep or cattle could do. Most are so effaced that to trace them was out of the question. We could only make out just enough to regret most bitterly the impossibility of restoring the whole.’

Helen and Dorothea had travelled ‘five hours’ from Maseru (passing Roma, the ‘chief station of the Roman Catholic missionaries in Basutoland’) to reach this rock shelter, where they worked through an afternoon thunderstorm. ‘The rain poured down in torrents, but not a drop touched us in the cave,’ Dorothea wrote later. The researchers had to pile up stones in order to reach paintings that had not been damaged. They carried out their copying work watched by a crowd of curious local people, described later as ‘an attentive audience of four Basuto men, two youths and ten pickaninnies’ who had followed them from the village. The site was on the slopes of a peak known as ‘Mochacha’, one of the highest in the foothills of the Malotis, ‘close to the village of Theko’. It was located on a well-traversed route that was known to other copyists, including the French artist and Protestant missionary Frédéric Christol, who had left in the cave ‘the mangled remains of a drawing of archers’ he had copied and published several years previously. Now, sadly, Dorothea and Helen found the group ‘past tracing’.