CHAPTER XX

WAR!--VIOLATION OF BRITISH TERRITORY AT NAKOB--THE END pp. 324-334

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE AUTHOR AT NAKOB, READY FOR A LONG TRIP _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

“BABYING” FOR DIAMONDS 8

SEALERS AT OLIFANTS ROCKS 20

TAKING THE HORSES ACROSS OLIFANTS RIVER 20

PROSPECTING PARTY NEARING THE MOUNTAIN OF RICHTERSFELDT,

NAMAQUALAND 26

DRIFTWOOD ON THE DESOLATE BEACH NEAR CAPE VOLTAS 26

THE TERRIBLE DESOLATION OF BARREN, RIVEN ROCK

BELOW THE GREAT FALLS 36

T’SAMMA IN THE DUNES 52

IN THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN KALAHARI 52

A FLOWER OF THE DESERT, SOUTHERN KALAHARI 68

THE CAMEL POST AT ZWARTMODDER, GORDONIA 68

A BEAUTIFUL GORGE OF THE ORANGE RIVER (NEAR

“AUSENKEHR”) 84

GRANITE RANGE BEHIND KUBOOS, RICHTERSFELDT 94

ENTRANCE TO A BAD PASS, RICHTERSFELDT 94

FEEDING THE HUNGRY AT THE STEINKOPF NATIVE MISSION

STATION, LITTLE NAMAQUALAND 100

HARD PULLING IN THE HALGHAT RIVER KLEIN, NAMAQUALAND 100

“KOKER-BOOMEN” (_ALOE DICHOTOMA_), RICHTERSFELDT

MOUNTAINS 112

A MOUNTAIN OF LACMATITI NEAR ZENDLING’S DRIFT,

RICHTERSFELDT 112

THE DEEP GORGE, 500 FEET OR MORE IN DEPTH, IN

WHICH THE ORANGE RIVER IS PENNED BELOW THE

GREAT FALLS 132

LAUNCH OF THE “OUTRIGGER” 168

“OUTRIGGER” ON WHICH WE CROSSED TO THE GERMAN

POST AT ZENDLING’S DRIFT 168

HOTTENTOT REFUGEES FROM THE GERMANS AT MOUTH

OF THE MOLOPO, ORANGE RIVER 192

INTERNATIONAL BEACON IN THE BAK RIVER, BORDER OF

GERMAN SOUTH-WEST 192

THE MAIN FALL, GREAT FALLS OF THE ORANGE 202

DUMPED WITH MY BELONGINGS IN THE DESERT WHILST

THE OXEN WERE DRIVEN ON TO SAVE THEM FROM

DYING OF THIRST 218

PACKING THE CART FOR THE JOURNEY 218

“OLD GERT” 230

“CANDELABRA EUPHORBIA” 230

ON THE GREAT SALT PAN, IN THE CENTRE OF THE

SOUTHERN KALAHARI DESERT 242

ON THE GREAT SALT PAN, SOUTHERN KALAHARI 254

BUSHMAN AT BOOMPLAATS, SOUTHERN KALAHARI 282

TEACHING CAMELS TO EAT T’SAMMA 282

THE HUGE NESTS OF THE “SOCIAL BIRDS” 288

WASHING FOR DIAMONDS AT THE BASE OF THE ESCARPMENT

AT NAKOB 300

A BREAKDOWN ON THE ROAD FROM PRIESKA 300

AN INTERNATIONAL BOUNDARY BEACON BETWEEN

GERMAN (LATE) SOUTH-WEST AFRICA TERRITORY

AND BRITISH (GORDONIA) 316

GRANITE MONOLITH AT “LANGKLEP” 328

WATER-PITS IN THE DRY MOLOPO AT NAKOB 328

THE GLAMOUR OF PROSPECTING

CHAPTER I

SOME WILD-GOOSE CHASES--DISCOVERY OF DIAMONDS IN GERMAN SOUTH-WEST

AFRICA--BRIEF HISTORY OF THE NEW MANDATORY, LUDERITZBUCHT.

What gave me “diamond fever” I don’t pretend to say. Certainly I have

no love for the cut and finished article, and nothing would induce me

to wear it; but for the rough stone, and for the rough life entailed in

searching for it, I have always had a passion. Yet the luck attending

many of my ventures has been but bad, or at the best, indifferent. The

first tiny glittering crystal that I found at the bottom of my wooden

“batea” in Brazil, many years ago, had cost me weeks of hard work and

every penny I possessed; and the months of hard digging and perilous

prospecting that followed that first “find,” and that led me through

the diamond-fields of Diamantina and Minhas Geraes, left me none the

richer except in experience. But the memory of those long-ago hardships

is a faint thing compared with the glamour that still clings to that

time; and even here in South Africa, the home of the diamond, not all

the vicissitudes of years spent on the Vaal River Diggings, or of

prospecting in far wilder spots, have taken away the fascination that,

to me, lies in this most precarious of all professions. Still, the

fruitless searches have been many, and I have often been called upon

to make long and arduous trips where the quest of precious stones has

proved nothing but a wild-goose chase.

A stray diamond, very possibly dropped by an ostrich, and maybe the

only one for a hundred square miles, has often led to a rush to where

it was found, whilst, frequently, circumstantial tales of the finding

of “precious” stones have been founded on the picking up of a beautiful

but worthless quartz crystal.

At no period of late years were rumours as to the finding of

diamonds more rife in South Africa than in 1907, when the sands of

Luderitzbucht, in adjacent German territory, were found to be full of

them, and when luck led me many hundreds of miles in another direction,

and spoilt my chance of being one of the first in those new and

wonderful fields.

Ever since the discovery of the first South African diamond in the

Hopetown District in 1867, a belief has been prevalent among the

thousands of diamond seekers scattered along the Vaal River Diggings

that rich fields of a similar nature must exist far lower downstream.

Yet, although the theory is logical enough, and many expeditions have

from time to time searched the banks far beyond the confluence of

Vaal and Orange, and a few have even reached the little-known lower

reaches of the latter and located both promising gravel and even stray

diamonds, nothing of a payable nature has so far been discovered in

that direction.

In the latter part of 1907 I was shown an extremely beautiful stone

of about twenty carats, that had been picked up by a transport rider

some fifty miles below Prieska; and the accompanying gravel that this

man brought in was so exactly a replica of the Vaal River “wash”

that I came to terms with the finder and set about arranging a small

expedition to accompany him and test the spot.

Before completing my arrangements, I went into Kimberley to try and

find an old digger partner of mine, who had always been particularly

anxious to explore the lower Orange River, and who, I thought, would be

just the man to accompany me.

After some trouble I found him, and before I could even broach the

subject of my visit he opened fire on me. “The very man I wanted to

see,” he burst out; “in fact, I was just writing to you. Man, I’ve just

seen a whole lot of diamonds from a new place entirely; they’re small,

but the chap who found them swears you can pick them up by the handful

where he got them.”

It appeared that the finder of these small stones was again a transport

rider, who had been working in German South-West Africa, and had

brought back a small phial full of these tiny stones, which he said

could be had for the picking up anywhere in the sand near a certain bay

he knew of. An hour later my friend had found him again, and I saw them

for myself--nearly fifty small, clean, and brilliantly polished little

diamonds, of good quality, astonishingly alike in size, and quite

different from either “mine” or “river” stones in appearance.

The man’s story was circumstantial enough, and March, my former

partner, was most anxious to accompany him back to German South-West,

and tried hard to induce me to join him.

Now, for years rumours had been current among prospectors and diamond

diggers, as to the existence of the precious gems in abundance

somewhere along the desolate, wind-swept shores of the little-known

country lying north and west of the Orange; but the region was too

remote and too inhospitable to encourage expeditions in that direction,

and the German _régime_ of the country by no means added to its

attractiveness. So that, tempting as the little “sandstones” were, I

was not to be persuaded; moreover, I had committed myself to the other

venture and consoled myself with the reflection that, after all, my

one big diamond from the Orange River was worth more than the whole

phialful brought from German territory. And when I told my tale in

turn and spoke of the big twenty-carat beauty I had seen, not only did

March promptly decide to come with me, but Du Toit, the discoverer of

the German stones, immediately threw in his lot with us, arguing,

doubtless, that it would be easier and quicker to fill bottles with big

diamonds than with little ones. “Anyway,” he said, “the other place

can wait; we can go there afterwards if we think it worth while.” And

so it was agreed, and thereby we probably missed a fortune, for the

place where Du Toit had found the diamonds is to-day one of the richest

diamond-fields in South-West Africa.

Anyway, the decision once arrived at, we lost no time in getting under

way, and a few days later we were on our way towards the spot where

the twenty-carat stone had been found, and which we fondly hoped would

prove as rich in big stones as Du Toit declared the sands of the German

coast were in small.

Into the details of that disastrous trip I shall not enter here.

Suffice it to say that four months later, ragged, footsore, broken in

health and practically penniless, we tramped back into Prieska, having

searched the southern bank of the river for nearly three hundred miles

without having found a single diamond. Gravel there was in abundance,

containing all the so-called “indications”--agates, jasper, chalcedony,

banded ironstone--in fact, all the usual accompaniments of the diamond

as they are found higher up the river, but never the diamond itself.

So good had these “indications” been that we were eternally buoyed up

by the hope that sooner or later we must strike the right place, and so

we had wandered on till the fine outfit we had started with had gone

piecemeal to keep us in food; and it was only when our small funds were

absolutely exhausted, and our tools and kit reduced to what we stood in

and could carry, that we gave up the quest of the “Fata Morgana” that

had led us on and on into the wild country near the “Great Falls” below

Kakamas, and beyond all trace of civilisation.

For weeks we had had no news, and had not seen a newspaper or received

a letter for months, and I well remember, when at long last we reached

Prieska, with what eagerness we hastened to the little post-office

for the budget we expected waiting for us. And the very first letter

I opened told me what this particular wild-goose chase had cost us,

for both it and numerous wires and newspapers of long weeks back

told of the sensational discovery of diamonds in the sands of German

South-West, and the fabulous finds that the lucky first-comers had made

there.

Newspaper reports spoke of men picking them up by the handful, filling

their pockets with them in an hour or two, of bucketsful lying in the

Bank. In fact, it was Sinbad’s wonderful “Valley of Diamonds” over

again; and, giving due allowance for the exaggeration usual to such

discoveries, there still could be no doubt that we had missed a fortune

by not going there with Du Toit four months back, instead of on our

disastrous trip down the river.

I had always liked Du Toit, who was one of the best Afrikanders I ever

met, but never did he show to such advantage as when he got this news;

his sun-flayed face went a shade pale as he read it, but all he said

was, “Ah, well, better luck next time, boys.”

But we didn’t get it.

* * * * *

At De Aar the little party divided, March and our guide of the last

venture going back to the River Diggings, whilst Du Toit and myself

returned to Cape Town, intent on getting up to German South-West Africa

as soon as possible.

And as German South-West Africa, now a Mandatory of the Union of South

Africa, will figure prominently in these pages, it may be as well

to give a brief account of that extensive country, which, until the

discovery of diamonds already alluded to, was very little known to the

average man even in Cape Colony, its next-door neighbour.

As early as 1867, owing to reports of rich mineral deposits existing

in the country then known as Great Namaqualand and Damaraland, the

Cape Government proposed to the Imperial Government the annexation

of the whole of the West African coastline from the Orange River to

Portuguese Angola, but no definite action ensued. And, in spite of

various “Resolutions” the Cape Government subsequently made in favour

of this extension of territory, nothing happened till 1877, when a

Special Commission was sent to Damaraland, where they received offers

of submission from the principal chiefs of the country.

The Imperial Government was, however, adverse to taking over the

whole of this vast coastline, with its then unknown hinterland, but

sanctioned the hoisting of the British flag at Walfish Bay, the

natural port of a huge stretch of country; and this tiny mouthful of

territory, bitten as it were out of the surrounding country that so

soon afterwards became German, has, much to the annoyance of Berlin,

remained British ever since.

At the time this annexation took place the hinterland was well

populated by various native tribes, the Damaras (also known as

Hereros), a people of Bantu descent who came from the north, and the

Namaquas, a Hottentot race who had gradually spread from the south.

The true aboriginals of the country were probably what are known to-day

as “Berg Damaras,” a little people of Bushman characteristics, small in

numbers, but ethnologically of far greater interest than either of the

two invading races. On the irruption of the Namaquas, these aboriginals

were mostly conquered and enslaved, but a few escaped to the mountains,

and retain their national characteristics to this day. Herero and

Namaqua eventually met somewhere about the vicinity of where Windhuk

now stands, and for a time each treated the other with respect; but

about 1840 the Namaquas, strengthened by the accession to their ranks

of certain half-breed desperadoes who had fled from Cape Colony and who

were well armed and mounted, attacked the Damaras to such purpose that

they were soon completely conquered and enslaved, and Jager Afrikander,

the chief refugee and desperado, became their chief. Between 1863 and

1870, however, the Damaras again rose and waged a war of independence,

being, however, again crushed. Ten years later a rising again occurred,

and the whole country was plunged in warfare. Meanwhile, however, the

white man had arrived upon the scene, the British at Walfish Bay, and

numerous white pioneers, including many Germans, had penetrated the

country beyond it.

Prominent among the pioneers were several missionaries of the Rhenish

Missionary Society, and upon their heels followed the traders, so

that when in 1880 the above-mentioned native trouble broke out, a

considerable number of white men were settled in the interior.

As British responsibility was conterminous with the boundaries of

her Walfish Bay territory, these venturesome settlers had but little

protection afforded them; and as German enterprise developed farther

south and trading ventures were started, Germany asked the British

Government for its protection for these pioneers. Certain negotiations

followed, and by June 1884 Germany had made up its mind to extend its

own protection to its subjects in Damaraland and Great Namaqualand,

and incidentally to afford the cover of its sovereignty to an enormous

concession of land near Angra Pequena which had been obtained by a

wealthy Bremen merchant named Luderitz from certain native chiefs.

This bay of Angra Pequena, so named by the Portuguese who discovered

it, is now known as Luderitzbucht; it lies about two hundred and fifty

miles south of Walfish Bay, and, although vastly inferior to the latter

port, also affords good anchorage. Here Luderitz started large trading

stations; and in 1884, in pursuance of Bismarck’s scheme of colonial

expansion, a belt of land twenty miles in width along the coast from

the Orange River northward to Portuguese territory (excluding, of

course, Walfish Bay) was placed under the protection of the German

Empire.

From that time German expansion marched quickly, and in June 1885 the

German dominion was extended over the whole of the vast hinterland up

to the 20th parallel of east longitude, the Gordonia border of the

present day.

Late in the day, but luckily just in time, the statesmen of Cape Colony

realised that this was but a step towards driving a German barrier

across South Africa from sea to sea; and as a counter-stroke, in 1885,

Bechuanaland (lying east of the new territory) was annexed as far north

as the Molopo River, and declared under British protection up to the

northern confines of the Kalahari Desert.

The Germans, foiled in their design of further expansion, set about

making the most they could of Damaraland. But red tape, officialism,

and their harsh and overbearing methods, hampered them in their attempt

at colonisation; moreover much of the land was practically desert

and up to the time of the discovery of diamonds at Luderitzbucht the

country had been run at a loss, and there had been a determined attempt

by the Socialists in the Reichstag to force its abandonment.

The Herero and Hottentot rebellion in 1903 dragged on for years, and

cost the Germans much blood and treasure, for they found themselves

utterly unable to cope with the extraordinary mobility of the native

commandos. These, excelling in guerilla warfare, harassed them

incessantly, and, although in vastly inferior numbers, gave the raw

German troops--fresh to the country--endless trouble before they were

subdued or captured.

Towards the end of this costly campaign the warfare was waged with

extreme bitterness, and indeed it ended in the virtual extermination of

the Herero race.

* * * * *

With this slight, and, I hope, pardonable digression, I will return to

Cape Town, where Du Toit and I at length embarked for Luderitzbucht.

[Illustration: “BABYING” FOR DIAMONDS.

The machine is called a “baby” (or more correctly “bébé,” after the

French digger who invented it), and is universally used by South

African diamond diggers.]

The _Frieda Woerman_ took us up the coast in comfort. We passed Port

Nolloth in a fog which showed us nothing of the forlorn little northern

copper port, and fog clung to us till we reached Luderitzbucht.

These sea-fogs are a feature of the South-West African coasts, and on

the British (Namaqualand) coast they are beneficial, as they distribute

a certain amount of moisture to the scanty vegetation of the coastal

belt; but at Luderitzbucht there is no vegetation for the fog to

moisten.

For, north, south, and east of it there is nothing but sand and barren

rocks, and this description applies to practically the whole of the

coast belt for hundreds of miles in either direction.

Luderitzbucht, at the time of which I write, was little more than a

forlorn collection of corrugated iron huts clustering around one or two

of the more important buildings, dignified by the names of “hotel,”

store, and Customs House. The streets were ankle deep in sand, and the

first thing that struck me was the enormous number of empty bottles

that lay piled and scattered about in all directions--principally

beer bottles, of course, but also thousands of mineral-water bottles,

for water was at that time extremely scarce. The very little obtained

locally was of poor quality, had a vile alkaline taste, and often

alarming medicinal effects upon the new-comer; moreover, it had never

been sufficient even for the scanty population existing here before

the discovery of diamonds. A large condensing plant had supplied the

deficiency in an intermittent manner, for it frequently broke down or

got out of order, and it was the usual thing in the early days to have

cargoes of water brought by steamer from Cape Town.

With the discovery of diamonds came the influx of “all sorts and

conditions of men” usual to “rushes” all over the world, and water

rose to famine prices. Washing in sea-water, when tried by a few

over-particular new-chums, was followed by extremely painful results,

for the brine aggravated a hundredfold the painful sun-blisters

inevitable in a country where the blazing rays of a sub-tropical

sun beat back with redoubled fierceness from the glaring, scorching,

all-pervading sand. A helmet, whilst absolutely essential, is after all

but little protection from a glare that comes from the sand all around

one as from a huge mirror. We soon found that, if this glare was to be

borne at all, it was by using spectacles of smoked glass, and these,

fitted with wire gauze side-protectors, are also essential in the

blinding sand-storms that form a frequent variation of Luderitzbucht

weather conditions.

We found the place so crowded that it was almost impossible to obtain

even the roughest accommodation; the hotels were full, the stores were

full, every shanty dignified by the name of a dwelling was crammed, men

“pigging it” four and six in tiny rooms meant for a single occupant,

and food, and above all water, at famine prices.

So great had been the rush, for a time, that the police had been quite

unable to cope with it, and when I came to see more of the motley crowd

of “fortune seekers” that had invaded the place, I easily forgave the

irascibility of the stout, overfed and overheated German officials

who had had to deal with them all. What a lot they were! Only a small

minority were genuine prospectors, engineers, or mining-men with a

legitimate interest in the diamond discoveries; the majority were

shady “company promoters,” bucket-shop experts, warned-off bookmakers

and betting-men (“brokers” they usually styled themselves), and

sharpers of all sorts, on the lookout for prey in the shape of lucky

diggers or discoverers. Then, too, there were a number of self-styled

“prospectors,” runaway ships’ cooks, stewards, stokers, and seamen,

the bulk of whom had never seen a rough diamond in their lives, and

of course a modicum of genuine men of past experience--principally

ex-“river-diggers”--men whose small capital was running away like water

for bare necessities in this miserable dust-hole of creation.

We soon found that most of the available land in the vicinity of

Luderitzbucht had been taken up, and much of it had already changed

hands two or three times. Companies and syndicates were being

“floated” at a great rate, many of them by unscrupulous scoundrels of

promoters, acting upon the “reports” of equally lying and unscrupulous

“prospectors.”

_Schurfscheinen_ (prospecting licences) were at that time transferable,

and as they were daily becoming more difficult to procure, they often

changed hands several times, and for quite large sums, before they were

even used for their legitimate purpose of enabling the holder to locate

and peg-off a claim. And often, when, as a result of an expensive

expedition, ground was located and title secured, the diamonds shown to

back up the “discoverer’s” or “promoter’s” highly coloured report would

be the only ones ever seen by the gullible purchaser or shareholder.

The conditions under which diamonds were found made “salting” a very

easy matter to carry out and a very difficult one to detect. The small

and brightly polished little gems, usually running three or four to

the carat--that is to say, about the size of hemp-seed--were generally

found in the surface deposit of loose sandy shingle spread over much

of the sand-belt near the coast, and differing from the sand of the

country only in being slightly coarser. This loose deposit, in common

with the sand, is in many places heaped up into small, wave-like

ripples by the action of the prevailing wind, and wherever the diamonds

exist these little ridges are exceptionally rich in them. The method of

searching for them was simply by crawling along almost flat upon the

ground, and turning over the shallow layer with a knife-point, though

on some of the claims hand-washing in sea-water was being attempted.

Most of the diamonds so far had come from a place known as “Kolman’s

Kop,” a mile or two inland from the bay, and on the railway to

Aus--indeed, the line ran right through this diamondiferous area--and

it was here that Du Toit had picked up his stones. So plentiful

were the little “crystals” that many a little bottleful of them had

been brought into Luderitzbucht in the early days and given away as

curiosities, without the slightest notion as to what they really were.

A few keen-eyed Kaffirs engaged in construction work on the railway,

and who had worked in the Kimberley mines or on the Vaal River

Diggings, first realised what they really were, and several of these

“boys,” who afterwards came to Cape Town, and there attempted to

sell the stones, were convicted and sentenced to various terms of

imprisonment under the provisions of the “I.D.B.” Act of Cape Colony.

Few, if any, of those who read the report of their trials believed

their story that they had picked up the stones in the sands of German

South-West Africa, but the few who did believe and made investigation

were amply repaid for their trouble, for the first-comers picked up

diamonds by the handful.

A few days tramping the surrounding district soon convinced us that all

the likely ground near Luderitzbucht had been taken up--and indeed much

that was unlikely--and we decided to clear off to an outlying district

where distance and want of water had thus far prevented “prospectors”

from penetrating.

A general examination of the gravel, sand, and various deposits had

shown to we old diggers the significant fact that, whatever the origin

of the diamonds, there was some analogy between these fields and those

of the Vaal River Diggings, for prominent everywhere were the familiar

pebbles of striped agate, chalcedony, jasper, etc., we knew so well.

Most of these pebbles were, however, very much smaller than those of

the Vaal River; moreover the action of wind and water had “graded” the

loose deposits to such an extent that whole acres appeared to have been

worked by sieves of a uniform mesh.

Now, this “grading” was also a feature of the diamonds themselves, for

they were of a remarkably uniform size, and in this respect differed

entirely from those of any other known deposit; for at Kimberley, or

on the Vaal River Diggings, one of the fascinations of the precarious

profession of diamond-digging lies in the fact that big and little

stones are found together, and the next spadeful of ground may bring

the digger a stone the size of a pea, or one the size of a potato.

Now, the general theory as to how the diamonds came to be in the

Luderitzbucht sands was that they had come from the sea, either from

a rich pipe beneath it, or from a huge deposit washed down the Vaal

and Orange Rivers during the course of countless ages, and out to sea,

whence the north-setting current had brought the diamonds ashore. And

we--pundits all--believed that, as the sea had obviously done the work

of “grading” the stones, there must exist vastly heavier deposits

_somewhere_ along the coast, where, it should follow, we should also

find vastly bigger diamonds. And those were what we wanted, the bigger

the better.

CHAPTER II

RUMOUR OF “HOTTENTOTS’ PARADISE”--UP THE COAST ON A SEALING

CUTTER--WALFISH BAY.

At that time rumour was rife that, somewhere in the terrible

wilderness of sand-dunes stretching north-east of Luderitzbucht,

there existed an oasis where not only water was plentiful, but where

diamonds, big ones, abounded. This fabled oasis was usually called the

“Hottentots’ Paradise,” and tradition maintained that to this remote

and inaccessible spot the remnant of that poor degenerate race of

natives that had escaped extermination at the hands of the Germans in

the recent rebellion had retreated. It was also rumoured that these

men were well armed, that they had cattle and food in abundance, and

that, cut off by a wilderness of waterless country, the Germans had

hesitated to attack them. There were other versions; in fact, no two

agreed exactly, except that the oasis was situated somewhere between

Luderitzbucht, Walfish Bay, the high plateau of the interior, and the

sea, and that there the diamonds were as big as they were abundant.

Already one or two abortive expeditions had started with the intention

of searching for this place, but none of them had got far; thirst had

in each instance conquered them; and at least one had lost every animal

it started with.

One day, when we were looking round as to the best direction in which

to make our own attempt, I was asked by a prospector to join an

expedition just being outfitted to search for this place, and he put

such a plausible tale before me that I hastened to consult Du Toit.

He shook his head when I told him the way this expedition proposed

travelling. “No water,” he said; “they’ll be back within a week, if

they get back at all! There are only two ways of searching for the

place: from the coast, having a boat with plenty of water waiting you,

or with camels. These fellows talk of mules--well, let ’em go. I’ve

heard of something better.”

Then he told me he had met a man he had known on the River Diggings

who had turned sealer, and had for some years past plied his dangerous

trade along this wind-swept coast in a little ten-ton cutter, and

that this man had told him that north of Sylvia Heights there existed

a wonderful beach where the pebbles were identical with those of the

Vaal River Diggings, but that they were very much larger. He said they

lay graded by the tide for miles and miles along the beach--agates,

chalcedonies, jaspers, and banded ironstones (the _bandtom_ of the

digger); and that, when he had come back from a holiday in Europe

and found all Luderitzbucht diamond-mad, he had resolved to go to

this beach, where he believed he would find them lying thick, but

that he had been in some trouble with the police and could not get a

_Schurfschein_. As we both had obtained these valuable documents, he

was quite prepared to run us up to this spot in his little cutter,

sharing expenses, and sharing in all claims we might be able to peg.

Now, this seemed a perfectly God-sent opportunity for locating the

“big stones” we all felt certain existed, and we set about getting

in stores for the trip at once. These consisted principally of hard

biscuit, “bully beef,” tea, coffee, and sugar, and above all water.

Of the latter we had two fairly large breakers, and a miscellaneous

collection of other utensils, ranging from big oil-drums to canvas

water-bottles--in all, an ample supply for fifteen or twenty days. We

went on board that very evening. Besides our pal the skipper, there

were two other hands, men who, had they chosen to wash themselves,

would probably have proved to be white, but who were so coated with

seal oil and the accumulated grime of many voyages that it was

impossible to say what colour was underneath it all. They spoke a

jargon that they fondly imagined was English, but I believe they were

Scandinavians of sorts. The little half-decked cutter barely held us

and our belongings, and would have been none too comfortable even for a

short trip such as we hoped for and anticipated.

And, unfortunately, our voyage was both long and disagreeable, for we

had scarcely got clear of Luderitz Bay one fine evening than it came

on to blow great guns, and so heavy did the weather become that our

skipper had to run clean out to sea. Up to then I had fondly imagined

I knew something about the sea, and was proof against such a very

amateur malady as sea-sickness; but alas! I had a lot to learn. Indeed,

I soon found that, in spite of a good deal of knocking about the sea

at various times, I really knew nothing of bad weather. There was no

snuggling down in a cosy cabin or the soft cushions of a big saloon

about this experience, no looking at big seas through the comforting

protection of thick plate-glass portholes. Here the huge waves were

towering, threatening, imminent; and nothing but the coolest of heads,

and strongest and steadiest of hands at the helm, could have kept the

little cockle-shell from shipping a big sea and foundering. Portions

of big seas she shipped repeatedly, and little seas in the intervals;

in fact, for hours she appeared to consider herself to be a sort of

submarine of which I suppose I must have been the periscope--for I was

continually endeavouring to stand erect in my attempt to dodge the

waves. Within an hour or two of leaving the bay I was wet through, and

continued so till I got on shore again; and during that period of three

nights and two days I had ample reason to know that sea-sickness is not

nearly as laughable as it looks! They gave me rum and water, and it

made me worse; they coaxed me with hard ship’s biscuit and fat bully

beef, and somehow it failed to entice me. Once, in a comparatively

dry interval, they managed to light a stove and make some alleged

coffee. It tasted so of seal oil that it merely effected the apparently

impossible by making me feel worse than I did before.

The skipper assured me that it was all my fancy when I told him that

the coffee-pot must have been used for trying down seal, and offered

to prove it by making another brew in the legitimate utensil used for

that purpose, that I might taste the difference. The only consolation

I had during the whole memorable sixty hours was that Du Toit was

apparently even worse than myself. He did not even attempt to dodge the

water as we shipped it, but lay with closed eyes and hands mechanically

clutching the oily stays, just where the first spasm caught him, and

except for groans, nothing coherent passed his lips but profanity

during the whole voyage. We had left Luderitzbucht at sunset on Tuesday

evening, and the gale that sprang up that night blew itself out

sufficiently by Thursday afternoon to enable them to put the cutter

about towards shore again. I did not witness the operation, but I heard

some cryptic remarks thereto, and knew by the way the crew fell over

me they were hurrying about something. Then the motion changed, and a

wave went over me broadside instead of lengthways. The sail flapped

furiously, and then she heeled over so that I rolled off my seat. And

then a quite new motion began, a bobbing, jerking, wrenching movement

that started fresh trouble. However, by dark that night we were in

sight of land, and I began to have some faint hope that, after all, we

might survive.

I was aroused from a broken and uneasy slumber by a chorus of quacks,

and cackles, and grunts, sounding as though the cutter had run clean

into a farmyard, and at this phenomenon I had just sufficient curiosity

in me to open my eyes and sit up. Dawn was breaking and we were close

to land, in comparatively smooth water, to the leeward of a small

island, from which arose the hubbub I had heard. It was not a farmyard,

however, but an island covered partly with big seals, and partly with

penguins and other sea-fowl in such incredible swarms that they

jostled each other for elbow-room. This was one of the many guano and

sealing islands lying off the coast of German South-West Africa, all of

which are British possessions belonging to Cape Colony. On several of

them diamonds are supposed to exist, but they are prohibited ground to

prospectors. I believe this to have been Hollam’s Bird Island, but had

no chance to inquire as my sitting position immediately brought on the

old trouble, and I had other urgent matters to attend to.

However, our troubles were almost over, for less than two hours later

the cutter was deftly manœuvred into a little indentation where the

water was comparatively smooth, and we got out the tiny dory that had

filled up most of the cutter’s foredeck room and landed. And never were

men more pleased than Du Toit and I, and we there and then agreed that

one trip in that cutter was enough. Once we had found the diamonds, we

would send it back to Luderitzbucht to charter a decent-sized boat to

go back in; but as for travelling back ourselves in her--not much!

According to the skipper the beach he knew of lay about three or four

miles down the coast, but this was the only safe landing-place and

anchorage, and here we must camp. So we got our water and provisions

ashore, and by the aid of a big bucksail and some driftwood we made

a shelter to live and sleep in. This driftwood lay in abundance all

along the sandy, desolate shore, and served excellently for fuel,

though it was too dry and rotten to be of much service for anything

else. The landing even of our few stores and belongings took up the

best part of the day, and we decided not to make our first trip to our

diamond beach till the morning; but just before sunset Du Toit and I

went a short distance inland to where the first high dunes began, and

climbed a prominent one for a look-round. And east, north, and south

there was nothing but sand; not a tree anywhere, only here and there a

stunted bush struggling forlornly against adversity; nothing but bare

waves, mounds, and ridges of desolate dunes as far as the eye could

reach, and to the west the equally (but not more) desolate ocean. No

sign of life anywhere except a few gulls over the sea, though on our

way back a jackal followed but a few paces behind, full of curiosity

at the strange beings the like of whom he had probably never seen

before. We saw several of these jackals during our stay there, and

they were all quite fearless. Their spoors and those of the _stronte

woolfe_, or brown hyena, were numerous, and the only spoors of any kind

to be seen along the desolate shore, where these creatures probably

picked up a precarious living from the dead fish occasionally stranded

there. A short distance up the coast we found a flat space where the

sand was comparatively hard, and where, apparently, in the past a

shallow lagoon had existed. Here there were a few straggling bushes,

thick-leaved and resinous, and scanty clumps of a sort of strong, wiry

rush seemed to point to moisture at a short distance below the surface.

Here, too, we found huge heaps of the shells of a species of large

limpet, shell middens showing that at one time a people existed in the

locality, probably the _strand looper_, the beach-roaming forerunner

of both Bushman and Hottentot. But except for the shells, no vestige

of him remained, nor of the water that he at one time drank at, though

probably a few feet dug in the sand might have laid that bare.

I wanted badly to sleep that night, but apparently the others had

different views. The sand was soft and dry, and a shallow hole scooped

in it for my hip and a heap for my pillow, with a blanket spread over

all, made a couch fit for a Sybarite, especially after the battering

my bones had received on board the cutter. Du Toit was already snoring

when I snuggled down, but I was far too used to his _basso profondo_

to let that keep me awake, and was just dropping off when the skipper

started an interminable argument with one of the other men on some

weird technicality connected with the sealer’s craft, and kept it up

apparently for hours. I did not like to interrupt them, but time after

time, just as I got fairly under way, their voices woke me. I saw the

big camp fire of driftwood sink and die down till nothing but a few

embers remained; I saw the late moon rise and flood the wide solemn sea

of dunes with mysterious light, saw the shadowy slinking forms of two

or three jackals sneaking about, less than a stone’s throw away; heard

the soft, soothing swish of the waves on the beach, and Du Toit’s solo;

but above all came this incessant wrangle.

At last I called out to the skipper, “Look here, Jim, when are you

fellows going to shut up? It must be nearly morning, and I want to

sleep!”

“Sleep?” said he. “Great Scott! why, I thought you’d never want to

sleep again! Why, man, you slept all the way from Luderitzbucht here!

Sleep? Why, you never opened your eyes all the way!”

“That was sea-sickness,” I said, “not sleep--sea-sickness!”

“Must ha’ been sleeping-sickness,” he chuckled, and the two other

asses chuckled too, and repeated his attempt at a witticism over and

over again with fresh chuckles till I got too ratty to do anything

but swear. And still they smoked, and talked, and yarned; until at

length, in sheer desperation, I grabbed my blankets and, with a parting

benediction that must have kept them warm till morning, cleared away

out of earshot, scraped a fresh couch out with a swipe of my foot,

snuggled up in my blankets and went to sleep instantly.

I awoke shivering, for as usual along the coast the early morning had

brought a dense sea-fog that enveloped everything, and had soaked

my blankets through and through. It had been to guard against this

drenching “Scotch mist” of a fog that we had erected the bucksail

shelter, from which Jim and his co-idiots had driven me, and under

which I now found them snoring in feeble opposition to Du Toit. They

were snug and dry, but the big sail above hung bellying down with

its soaking weight of accumulated moisture, whilst the guy-ropes were

stretched taut for the same reason.

[Illustration: SEALERS AT OLIFANTS ROCKS.

The only white man (Irish) is the man standing behind.]

[Illustration: TAKING THE HORSES ACROSS OLIFANTS RIVER.]

Of course I simply had to do it--they were too snug and dry and warm,

and I was too wet and cold, to allow of any other course of action!

So I just snicked the guy-ropes slightly in a weak spot and hurried

back and turned in again in my wet blankets, hoping for the best. It

came soon--a muffled squelch--followed by a perfect bedlam of polyglot

profanity. I heard someone get mixed up with the pots and buckets and

make disparaging remarks about them; I heard another’s periods cut

short by a sound impossible to write, but that conveyed a pleasant

picture of an attempt to get rid of a full mouthful of sand--in fact,

though I could see nothing, I could hear enough to conjure up a vivid

picture of what was happening under that extremely wet and extremely

heavy bucksail.

At length they struggled out, as I could visualise by the storm of

recrimination and accusations.

“You donder!” I heard Du Toit snort (I found later his nose was badly

bashed by a bucket). “I knew you didn’t tie the _verdomte touw_

properly!”

“Oh, blazes!” retorted Jim’s voice, “here’s a slab-sided son of a

zand-trapper, that don’t know a rope from a reim, trying to tell a

sailor-man how to tie knots. H----! Why, you snored the blamed thing

down! Where’s your partner anyway? Asleep, I s’pose, under all that.

Well! what did I say about sleeping-sickness?”

They then appeared to search for me; and then one of the incoherent

gentlemen made a remark to Jim.

“So he did,” I heard him agree; “cleared out when we were talking. I’d

clean forgotten. He’ll be asleep somewhere. Sleep!”

Then they came and found me, and of course found me asleep, and made

fitting remarks.

I relate this little incident at full length because it happened to be

the only cheerful happening of that disastrous trip.

Directly the fog lifted and we had re-erected the tent and had some

breakfast, we took a sieve and a spade or two and started towards

the beach, leaving one of the crew to watch tent and cutter. It was

probably nearer four miles south than three--a long, wearisome drag

through heavy sand for the most part, for the tide was high and we

could not follow the water’s edge.

At length we came to it, and I must confess that when I first set eyes

upon that beautiful stretch of clean and polished gravel I felt that

Jim had been right, and that here, if anywhere in German South-West, we

should find the “big stones” in plenty.

For this mile-long beach looked like a vast débris heap of all the

fancy pebbles the “new-chum” digger usually collects during his first

month or so on the River Diggings: striped agates of all shades,

jaspers, cornelians, chalcedonies, and above all the yellow-and-black

striped banded ironstone, _band-toms_ of the digger.

And along that most disappointing beach we searched day after day,

always hoping and expecting to find, and always in vain. We tried

the larger-graded pebbles farther from the water first, hoping for

Cullinans or at least Koh-i-noors, and by degrees we worked down to

the water’s edge, where the grit was but little coarser than that of

Luderitzbucht; but all to no avail.

We sank prospecting-pits 5 or 6 feet in depth at regular intervals,

always finding the same promising material, always getting the same

disappointing result. We turned over the big stones by hand, we

“gravitated” the small stuff by sieve, as we had learnt to do years

before; there were no diamonds there.

The sun flayed us, for the heat during the day was terrific, and the

nights were correspondingly cold and damp with the heavy sea-fog, that

came down always towards morning. We grudged ourselves time for food

and sleep, so obsessed were we with the idea that the diamonds _must_

be there somewhere. Moreover, the little food we did get was of bad

quality, and the water abominable. A good deal of knocking about South

Africa had inured me to drinking bad water--alkaline, stagnant, full

of animalcules, etc.--but this stuff was different, and I soon found

that Jim had been right when he had protested that the coffee-pot was

not generally used for seal oil. It was not the pot that the taste came

from, it was the water itself. Every beaker, every cask, every drum,

every utensil was impregnated with oil, there was absolutely no getting

away from it. And yet so soaked in the same unctuous, all-pervading

liquid were the three sealers that they could not taste it; in

fact, they could not understand my own and Du Toit’s repugnance to

drinking it, in the least! But to me, as water, this liquid was quite

undrinkable, as coffee I swallowed it with an effort and kept it down

with a greater one, and as tea I never had the pluck to try it more

than once.

One morning, after an exceptionally heavy fog, a drop or two of water

percolating through the bucksail and falling on my nose not only

awakened me, but gave me a brilliant idea. “What an ass!” I thought,

as I jumped up there and then. “Why, I could have had a pint or two

of rain-water every day had I thought of it!” I cleared out with a

dipper and pail, and sure enough there was quite a pint of water caught

in the slack of the sail. And I scooped it out, and raked the embers

together, and put my own tin “billy” on to boil and promised myself a

cup of tea made with pure water, not oil! And I went and woke Du Toit

and told him, and he came and sat by the fire to watch me brew it. Of

course we’d no milk, but we had sugar, and I poured out two “beakers”

(enamelled mugs) of it, and set them to cool. Du Toit was in a hurry;

he blew his. “Smells good,” he said, and took a big gulp.

“Scalded you a bit, eh?” I asked, as I noticed the tears come to his

eyes in a valiant attempt to swallow what he’d supped. He nodded,

didn’t seem to trust his voice somehow! Then I took mine, first

pouring it from cup to cup to cool it, and taking a mighty draught

“at one fell swoop.”... As soon afterwards as I was able I went over

to Jim and roused him gently but firmly. “Jim,” I asked, “how did you

make this bucksail waterproof?” “Oh!” he replied enthusiastically,

“she’s a real good ’un is that bucksail! I took a lot of trouble

with her. Soaked her in paraffin first of all, then went over her

with raw linseed oil. She still leaked a bit, and a feller at the

whaling-station at Saldanha Bay gave me some whale oil for her, and I

soaked that into her. Then, when I heard what you fellows wanted up

here, I bunged some good old seal oil into her, and now she’d take a

lot of beating!”

And “she” would have--for she tasted of all the lot--I haven’t

forgotten that tea yet!

We spent ten days incessantly searching the gravel, and at length gave

it up in despair. Jim advised us that we had only about water enough

for six days, and, bad as it was, we knew we could not do without it,

and the only question was whether to return to Luderitzbucht, or to

try our luck at another place a lot farther up the coast. One of the

Scandinavians suggested the latter. He said he had been there but once,

but that the gravel was identical with that we had been trying. Only

there was much more of it. It was a long way off, however, somewhere

near Cape Cross, north of Walfish Bay and Swakopmund, and if we decided

to go we should have to call at Walfish Bay for water. But, Jim

continued, we were nearer the latter place than Luderitzbucht, the wind

would probably be more in our favour; and we voted _en masse_ for these

fresh fields. Before sailing, however, Du Toit and I went about four

miles inland into the dunes to an extremely high and prominent one, a

real sand-mountain about 200 feet high, from which we hoped to get a

view of the sandy wastes generally, as we had still a lingering hope

that we might yet find a similar deposit to that of Kolman’s Kop, with

plenty of small stones, even though we could not find the big ones.

From this huge, bare dune--the sand on the crest of which lay piled for

the crowning 10 feet in an almost sheer wall--we had a fine panorama

of the terrible waterless waste surrounding us, treeless, bare, and

horrible in the glaring sun, awful in its featureless monotony of

huge wave after wave of verdureless sand. Away south, in the far

distance, we could see higher land near the coast, probably “Sylvia’s

Heights,” and inland, faintest of faint cobalt against the glare, the

outline of a long range of mountains, between which and the farthest

distinguishable sand-dunes danced a lake of shimmering mirage, seldom

absent in these wide spaces of the desert. Here and there, among the

long ridges of the dunes, spaces could be noted which appeared to be

covered with low bush, and towards one of these “pans” I made my way,

whilst Du Toit struck out for a similar one in an opposite direction.

The going was extremely difficult, for the dunes here lay in long

parallel lines, very close together, very high and steep, and naturally

with very deep corresponding valleys between; and my way lay across

them. The distance appeared nothing, but each successive dune I climbed

seemed to bring me no nearer the pan I was aiming for, and which was

only visible for a second or two as I reached the crest of each big

sand-wave. Anything more tedious than this crossing of the bare dunes

it is impossible to imagine, though slower progress might conceivably

be made in an attempt to cross a closely built city by climbing up,

over and down the houses instead of using the streets.

However, I reached the pan at last and found it to be an oval-shaped

“floor,” strewn thickly with water-worn pebbles and quite free from

sand. Scattered bush grew here and there upon it, and near the centre I

saw larger trees growing. These I found to be tall thorn-trees, called

locally _cameel doorn_, a species of thorny acacia which is usually

found in or near watercourses; and at this time of the year they were

covered with little yellow balls of bloom, scenting the air deliciously

with the smell of cowslips. And here, in the middle of this sea of

dunes, they lined a watercourse, and though it was bone-dry, there

was evidence that at one time a considerable quantity of water had

flowed there. Many of the larger trees, the girth of a man, were dead,

and much larger blackened stumps were plentiful. This dry watercourse

disappeared under the sand-dunes at either end of the pan, and a closer

inspection of the whole extent of the latter showed that it was the

remaining trace of what had at one time undoubtedly been the wide bed

of a river of considerable extent, of which the narrow tree-lined

watercourse in the centre had been the last surviving trickle. Later,

I found many of these beds among the dunes, all choked with sand and

long dead and extinct, but showing indisputably that this country was

not always the waterless desert it is to-day. In some cases water still

flows deep in their sand-choked beds, and can be obtained by digging.

An hour or two spent in this spot convinced me that there were no

diamonds to be picked up, and I turned back coastwards, after being

rejoined by Du Toit. He had been to a similar pan still farther inland,

and his conclusion had been that of myself, that it formed part of an

ancient river-bed overwhelmed and choked by the dunes. He also said

that from a high dune there, through his glasses, he had seen a very

much wider expanse of country of a similar nature through a break in

the dunes inland, and that it had appeared to be quite thickly wooded.

He had also seen moving objects in that direction, but whether gemsbok

or cattle he could not say. At any rate it was apparently an oasis, and

quite possibly the “Hottentots’ Paradise” we had heard so much about.

At least, so thought Du Toit. “But it’s a long way, and the dunes seem

to get worse in that direction. It would take us a day and a half to

reach it; that means we’d have to take water for three days, for we

could not depend on finding water there. And if it is the place, there

are a lot of well armed Hottentots there, and we’ve no rifles, and

we’ve no trade goods to barter with. No, it’s not worth the risk; but,

man, if the yarns we’ve heard are true, there must be piles of diamonds

there!”

[Illustration: DRIFTWOOD ON THE DESOLATE BEACH NEAR CAPE VOLTAS.

The low point in the distance.]

[Illustration: PROSPECTING PARTY NEARING THE MOUNTAIN OF RICHTERSFELDT,

NAMAQUALAND.]

So we turned our backs reluctantly on that unknown oasis--which may

indeed have been no oasis at all, and nothing more than a big pan

similar to those we had examined--and toiled back to the coast.

No matter how good a walker a man may be in the ordinary way, he will

find the first few days’ walking in the dunes a most painful and

exhausting experience. Wading through loose sand up to the ankle,

climbing up it at a steep angle, and plunging down it on the other

side of the dune, only to repeat the process, _ad infinitum_, exercise

a terrific strain upon muscles scarcely called into play in ordinary

walking; and ten miles a day across country like this is a severe

strain upon a new hand at the game. With practice, of course, he can

do double, and with experience he falls into a peculiar shuffling gait

which is the most noticeable feature about the farmer and others who

dwell in these sandy districts and who are nicknamed “Zand-trappers.”

All of which Du Toit imparted to me as we walked back to the coast.

“You lift your feet too high,” he said, “like these blooming Germans do

when they’re goose-stepping. Walk like this.”

I told him I should be sorry to, and he appeared annoyed; but I found

that, though I could beat him easily on the hard flat, I stood no

chance with him in the sand, and what I had always put down to bunions

or sore feet was really this “zand-trapping” gait that he had acquired

in his youth, and never got rid of. Most men who live among the sand

wear low _veldtschoens_, without socks. These _schoen_ are easily

kicked off and emptied of their accumulation of sand periodically;

whilst many adopt the practice of cutting a small hole in the sole

near the toe, through which they occasionally shake out the dusty

contents. Ordinary boots last but very little time, as the sand has an

extraordinary abrading action upon the leather, cutting the stitching

holding sole and upper together in a few days.

We got back and told Jim about what we had seen, and he put finality to

the matter by declaring that if we were mad enough to try to reach the

oasis we could walk back to Luderitzbucht with the diamonds, as he’d

be “somethinged” if he’d wait for us! Moreover, he’d packed everything

on to the cutter, and if we wanted to beat up to Walfish Bay and Cape

Cross we’d better get on board at once.

I had hoped for a good night’s rest that night, but instead, like a

lamb to the slaughter, I was led to that wretched cutter, where again,

to a modified extent, what Jim called my “sleeping-sickness” floored

me. However, this time the weather was fine and the breeze was fair,

and two days later we ran into Walfish Bay.

A magnificent stretch of water, perfectly protected from the prevailing

winds, and capable of accommodating an enormous fleet, it is certainly

the key of the huge German hinterland; and it was a very far-seeing

policy on the part of England not only to secure it for herself, but

to hold tight to it against all the wiles and blandishments of German

diplomacy.

For had England given it up, the Germans would have undoubtedly

transformed it into a most powerful naval base, which would have

been not only a menace to the Cape mail route, but to all British

possessions farther south, and would incidentally have forced the

maintenance of a powerful fleet at or near the Cape.

Important as the place is strategically, however, England (or rather

Cape Colony, of which it forms an integral part) has done little to

develop this small slice of territory. A fairly good pier and a few

forlorn-looking corrugated iron buildings looking as though they had

been dumped down, forgotten and deserted, constitute the settlement,

which stands forlornly on the bare sand.

A resident magistrate, a few born-tired officials, a “hotel”- and

store-keeper--in all a handful of the slackest white people I ever

saw--constituted the population. The condensing gear on which they

relied principally for water was out of repair, which (according to

Jim’s remarks about it) appeared to be its normal state; and here we

had to wait four days before we could fill our miscellaneous collection

of water “tanks.”

CHAPTER III

THE NAMIEB DESERT, “SAM-PANS”--CAPE CROSS--SWAKOPMUND--WINDHUK.

Meanwhile a local acquaintance of Jim’s asked Du Toit and me to go

with him a day’s journey up the Khuisiep River, to a place in the

Namieb Desert, where he believed that tin existed, and I jumped at

the opportunity. We had good horses and travelled light, with a few

roster-kooks and some biltong by way of provisions, and a water-bottle

each. Riding south from the forlorn-looking settlement, we followed

the thin line of vegetation denoting the river-bed, which, when it

contains water, empties itself into the lagoon terminating the southern

extremity of the bay. Thence, striking inland, the bed widens till it

becomes a long stretch of wooded country offering the most striking

contrast to the barren desert and sandhills that hem it in on either

side. But, in spite of the thick verdure and fine trees, there is no

water to be met with along the whole route, except immediately after

rains, and at one or two spots where pits have been sunk.

What a treat those trees were, though! The eye, aching with the red-hot

glare of a whole landscape of bare, scorching sand, turned to their

beautiful greenery with a wonderful sense of rest and relief.

Most of them were varieties of acacia, _cameel doorn_, such as I have

described, and others covered with huge, bean-like pods, and most

striking among them were fine, majestic trees resembling big oaks in

outline, and giving the whole well-wooded expanse a beautiful park-like

aspect.

There was plenty of welcome shade, especially from a smaller but

thicker-leaved tree of a variety of wattle; grass and creeping plants

made a verdant carpet, butterflies flitted about among brilliant

flowers, and bright-plumaged birds called to each other in the trees.

In fact, to us, fresh from sand and sea and “sleeping-sickness,” it

was Paradise. And I said so to Du Toit as we off-saddled for a bite at

midday, knee-haltering our ponies and taking our snack under the shade

of a big mimosa. I said to him, “Let’s stop here! Anyway, if we find

diamonds or tin, let’s stop here! What can we want more? Green trees,

birds, flowers, grass, shade for the seeking, water for the digging!

This is Paradise, and it’s good enough for me. I’m going to sleep.”

And I did, Du Toit, with unwonted consideration, offering to keep an

eye on the horses, and wake me when it was time to trek again. But

I did not sleep long. I awoke with the pleasant sensation of being

stabbed all over with red-hot needles. One eye was too swollen to

work, but the other advised me of the fact that it was not needles

that were troubling me, but a small yet most iniquitous insect that

had sampled me before in other sandy parts, but that, in my delight at

the beautiful trees and beautiful shade, I had forgotten. This was the

“sam-pan.” I had seen him before, but this time I had evidently found

him at home, where he lived! He was all over me--a small, pernicious

infliction ranging in size from a pin’s head to a shirt-button, flat,

almost circular in shape, and with legs all around his perimeter.

Entomology is not my strong point, but that’s how he looks, and he

feels as though he had a mouth on each foot. And in this case he had

caught me just as he might have caught the most abject greenhorn: lying

asleep in the shade of a tree where there were obvious signs that

cattle, or big buck, had been in the habit of standing.

These horrible little pests are one of the biggest scourges of the

desert. They are a species of tick that breed in the droppings of

animals, and burrow in the sand of the immediate vicinity, lying low

till some juicy, full-blooded victim comes along for them to perform

upon. For this reason they are always plentiful under certain shady

trees, favoured by oxen and big game as a resting-place in the heat

of the day. Choose one of these spots and sit down in the pleasant

shade and watch the sand around you. Not a sign of insect life for the

first few minutes--and then! A tiny eruption in the sand near your

elbow, and there, scratching his way to daylight--and you--comes the

pioneer, followed by others till the whole earth is alive with them.

And bite! So poisonous are they to some people that to be bitten badly

leads to blood-poisoning, and in any case the intolerable itching from

their bites spoils a man for sleep or anything else but scratching and

inventing new profanity for days and days after he has been victimised.

All of which I had known, and still Du Toit and his companion in crime

had caught me beautifully, with the enticing shade of that big tree.

They lay sleeping peacefully, a bare twenty yards away, under a bush

thick enough to shade them and too small to have harboured oxen--or

sam-pans.

We followed the Khuisiep till late that evening, when we came to a

water-hole where our horses drank, and near which we slept that night,

not too near, for the immediate vicinity was literally buzzing with

mosquitoes. The stagnant water was also full of their larvæ--so full

that we strained it through a handkerchief before boiling a billy of

it for coffee, and got a spoonful of larvæ to each billy. Still it was

quite drinkable as coffee, much better than the oleaginous liquid Jim

provided us with.

The following morning we left the Khuisiep and turned up a tributary

watercourse (dry) coming from the desert eastward; a few miles up

which we left the sand behind and came into rocky, broken country,

sterile and quite without vegetation. Here there were many outcrops of

granite, and in certain parts of the dry stream-bed garnets were lying

by the bucketful. They were a constituent of the granite, but in many

instances had been mistaken for ruby tin. Black titaniferous iron-sand

also abounded in this stream-bed, and in many of the small quartz

reefs large crystals of jet-black tourmaline were to be seen--some

of them huge specimens as thick as one’s wrist. Unfortunately, real

prospecting was out of the question, as we had neither tins nor tools;

but the country is a most interesting one, and it is quite possible

that some day a valuable discovery of tin may be made there. Want of

water--that great handicap to prospecting in South Africa--prevented

us even “panning” the river-bed; but certain sand and gravel, which I

took back to the nearest water that night and panned there, yielded

both tin and copper, and a fine “tail” of gold. This spot was just over

the border of British territory, but the unnamed river apparently came

from the mountains, plainly visible in German territory eastward. Our

trip back was uneventful, and we arrived at Walfish Bay the following

evening, where we solved the water question and found Jim ready to

start. Before doing so I indulged in the extravagance of purchasing a

small cask for water for my own use; a procedure that called forth such

an amount of elaborate sarcasm from Jim and Co. that I soon regretted

it, more so as I found on broaching it that the contents tasted as

strongly of tar as the other had done of oil.

Again the cutter had favourable winds, and this time neither Du Toit

nor myself was seasick, a fact Jim commented upon most ungraciously,

as he said we took up less room and were far less in the way when

suffering from “sleeping-sickness” than we were doing now we thought we

were sailors. There’s no pleasing some people!

We landed at a spot some seventy miles up the coast, and not far

distant from Cape Cross, where Diego Cam, one of John of Portugal’s

intrepid old navigators, placed a _padrâo_, or stone cross, when he

first landed there in 1460 or thereabouts. This cross, from which the

Cape takes its name, has long since disappeared, but according to

Jim the sculptured socket in which it was set can still be seen on

a prominent point of the rock. Probably it was the only part of the

monument that the early souvenir-hunters could not take away with them.

However, much as I wished to see it, we did not get to Cape Cross that

journey. We landed in a little cave within a short walk of the beach we

were in search of, a beach identical with that one we had prospected

lower down the coast, and which yielded identical results. We searched

it for a week and found no diamonds.

Moreover we wandered inland, for the interior here, though barren and

inhospitable, did not present the difficulties of the huge sand-dunes

we had encountered lower down. Flat sandy wastes there were, devoid

of vegetation, but easily traversed, and these were also broken by

frequent barren kopjes, whilst but a few miles inland we saw high,

flat-topped mountains. In many of the dry watercourses and on certain

spots on the sand-flats we found likely-looking gravel, but never

any diamonds, and at the end of ten days we decided to return to

Swakopmund, from whence we could pick up a steamer to Luderitzbucht.

Jim suggested this course to us, whilst offering, if we so wished, to

carry out his original offer to land us there himself. “But,” said he,

“if you’re not keen on it, I’ll just drop you at Swakopmund, where

you’ll get a boat easier than you would at Walfish Bay. We’ve got

something else on up here that might be worth our while--if you really

are not keen!” We quite fell in with Jim’s view, for we neither of us

relished beating back against headwinds all the way to Luderitzbucht in

the cutter; besides, Jim had proved himself a white man right through,

and we didn’t want to stand in the way of that mysterious “something

else” he had on. We never asked him what it was, but some funny things

could be told about those sealing cutters’ doings along the coast in

those days--when none of them were particularly keen about the German

Customs regulations! Well, good luck to Jim and his “crew” anyway--they

were good sorts!

So they landed us at Swakopmund, and before leaving again Jim told us

that he expected to be back in Luderitzbucht in about a month, and,

if we were still there and cared to do it, he would take us down to

a place not far north of the Orange River mouth where he had heard

diamonds had been picked up.

But our late experience had shaken our faith in promising-looking

gravel patches, and so we omitted to follow up this clue, which, as

events proved later, might very probably have led us to discover the

famous and fabulously rich Pomona fields. So, with a vague promise

to meet again somewhere, we parted from Jim, who cleared away up the

coast--ostensibly at least--on his mysterious errand, and whom I never

saw again.

The officials at Swakopmund were both surly and suspicious, but luckily

our papers were in order, and we could show sufficient funds to satisfy

the immigration authorities; and as we found we should have to wait ten

days for a steamer, we decided to run up to the capital, Windhuk, after

first having a good look round Swakopmund and the immediate vicinity.

Disappointed in their efforts to obtain the country’s natural port at

Walfish Bay, the Germans had done their best to construct a harbour at

Swakopmund, which is really the mouth of the Swakop, or more correctly

“Tsoachaub” river. This river, in common with all others of this

country, only flows during the summer months, but water can be obtained

in abundance almost all along its course by digging in the sand. From

a few miles inland its banks are covered with vegetation, and indeed

these long dry river oases are a frequent and pleasant feature of this

part of the Protectorate.

Although large sums of money must have been spent upon the attempt at

a harbour at Swakopmund, it appears to be a very qualified success.

There is a stone jetty that offers some protection to tugs in fine

weather, but ships have to lie in the roadstead, and when the

prevailing gales are blowing landing is both difficult and dangerous.

The township boasts quite a number of good buildings, and is a credit

to the orderly ideas of German officialism. A good deal of ore was

being brought down by rail from Otavi, a copper-mine some 250 miles

north-west, connected by a 2-feet gauge line. This and the landing of a

tremendous amount of army stores, waggons, and artillery made the port

quite a busy one. And an Englishman whom we met at the hotel told us

that the amount of stores landed during the latter part of the recent

Hottentot and Herero rebellion had been enormous, and that depôts were

being built all over the country inland to allow of their storage.

Considering that the two races were practically wiped out at the time

peace was declared, it is difficult to understand what all these stores

and munitions of war are needed for.

We went to Windhuk on the third day, a slow and tedious journey of 237

miles which took us over twenty-four hours to accomplish.

At Swakopmund the coastal sand-belt is at its narrowest, a short run of

a few miles taking one clear of the dune region; thence the country,

though sterile, is broken and hilly, and the line gradually ascends

towards the plateau that forms the interior. Here the scenery--after

the awful monotony of the sandy wastes near the coast--was interesting

and in places not without beauty; hill and plain, mountain and

river-bed, succeeding each other, and the latter, though dry, being in

most cases extremely well wooded. Many of the mountains are lofty, and

most of them are table-topped. Windhuk is a pretty place. Lying nearly

5,000 feet above sea-level, it is built in a rocky plain surrounded by

hilly and picturesque country. Vegetation is abundant, as the rainfall

is good; moreover, there is an abundance of water, mostly obtained from

thermal springs in the hills to the north of the settlement. There are

five of these hot springs, ranging in temperature from tepid up to

nearly boiling-point, and many of the houses have this water laid on

in pipes. It is also used when cold for irrigating gardens, etc., but

in addition there are cold springs that issue from the limestone of

the valley below.

[Illustration: THE TERRIBLE DESOLATION OF BARREN, RIVEN ROCK BELOW THE

GREAT FALLS.]

Boring has also produced water at no great depth wherever it has been

attempted, and as in the rainy season (January to April) the rainfall

varies from 15 to 20 inches, it can readily be seen that Windhuk, and

in fact most of the neighbouring portion of Damaraland, is by no means

badly off in that respect.

As in Swakopmund, the principal houses, public buildings, etc., were

all new and well built, and the place was then rapidly growing; and

with a good climate, and green trees everywhere, Windhuk is likely to

become a most pleasant abiding-place.

Between the hills north of Windhuk there is a smaller settlement known

as Klein Windhuk, which is situated in a very fertile valley, where

vegetables and fruit are grown in abundance. Should some means be found

for conserving the water which flows away in such abundance during the

summer months, this and many similar valleys are well suited for the

growing of mealies and lucerne, for which there is apparently a very

great demand.

Windhuk was at that time an important military station; in fact, the

civilian population was insignificant, and the hotel was crammed

with officers. Among these I met a Hauptmann, whom I will call

Müller, who was a most striking contrast to the general run of

overbearing, swashbuckling officers. He spoke English well and was

most courteous and affable, especially when he learnt that I knew

something of geology. He had just returned from a trip south to the

Gibeon district, and he showed me some samples of excellent “blue

ground”--Kimberlite--he had found there. He badly wanted me to return

with him and prospect the place, but as I had made all arrangements

to return to Luderitzbucht and Cape Town, I could not do so. And much

to my regret, for his theory that these were the pipes from which the

coastal deposits of diamonds had come originally was not as far-fetched

as it appeared at first; for he explained it by a theory of glacial

denudation of such pipes in the remote past, and said there was

abundant evidence everywhere that such action had taken place, and that

the glaciers had travelled from north-east to south-west right across

the country to the sea.

As I could not go, I suggested to Du Toit to do so, but this he would

not do, as he got on with the Germans worse than I did; in fact, if

they treated me with scant courtesy, they treated Du Toit with none!

These Germans profess to despise the Boers, and many of the latter who

fled into German territory rather than accept British rule after the

Boer War had been very glad to return to the protection of the Union

Jack.

Meanwhile Hauptmann Müller very kindly lent me a horse and took me

round the settlement, talking incessantly the while of the future of

the Protectorate, of which he had a great opinion. He had been in the

Cape Colony and Transvaal, and spoke with admiration not unmixed with

envy of our rich mines and splendid resources.

“We came late,” he said; “you English had all the good land. But now we

have diamonds and copper here, and when the Protectorate pays we will

develop the country--that is, if we have not fought you before then.”

For this refreshing man made no secret of his belief that war between

England and Germany was inevitable. “You English have the pick of the

world,” he said, “but you cannot keep it! You have no army, and we are

building a navy that will equal your own. And when ‘The Day’ comes we

shall smash you up and take what we want, and you will decline into

a little second-rate Power. We must do so; you cannot confine us to

Europe and the waste places of the earth.”

He told me that a toast I had heard in the hotel was being drunk all

over the German Empire, and that every officer longed for the war. “It

means their chance, it means promotion to them,” he explained; “your

Empire is declining, it has seen its day; and now comes Germany’s.” We

parted perfectly good friends, and I certainly preferred his impudent

frankness to the scowls and surly demeanour of most of his compatriots.

Returning to Swakopmund, we caught the _Frieda Woermann_ back to

Luderitzbucht, and in that comfortable little liner had a very

different trip from the one we had experienced in Jim’s cutter. At that

time the skipper of this well-known coast boat was an enormously fat

man, and his chief engineer was built on the same lines, and it was

a standing joke, whenever they happened to appear on deck together,

for the passengers to rush in mock panic to the opposite side of the

ship, with the avowed intention of balancing her and keeping her from

capsizing. But they were a very harmless, good-natured old pair, and

played scart interminably.

Luderitzbucht was still prospecting-mad, but apparently no new

discoveries had been made of any great importance, and new regulations

were being promulgated at such a rate, and such restrictions were

being placed upon diggers and prospectors, that men were beginning to

leave the country. So frequent and so contradictory had been these new

regulations, that it had often happened that men who had been absent on

a pegging expedition for a week or two would return to find that the

new laws rendered all their work useless. In short, there appeared very

little scope for us there; and after one or two abortive trips to spots

we had heard of, and which we found to be useless or already pegged, we

decided to return to British territory.

We were strengthened in this resolve by what we heard from a relative

of Du Toit’s: a certain Stuurmann, who had been in German employ during

the whole of the Hottentot rebellion, and was one of the many Dutch

transport-drivers living in the Boer camp just outside Luderitzbucht.

This chap had at one time followed the Orange River from its mouth up

to the Great Falls, and the account he gave of certain spots on its

banks, and notably of huge stretches of gravel near the Great Fish

River mouth, made us all eagerness to get there as soon as possible.

The description of these gravels tallied, it is true, with the blank

patches we had gone so far after, but in this case, we argued, they

were near that possible source, the Vaal River Diggings; and though we

had followed similar patches in vain from Prieska down to below the

Great Falls, there remained this 150 miles of the almost unknown lower

reaches, and they had always appealed to us!

Moreover, Stuurmann said that in places he had noticed innumerable

bright crystals sparkling in the gravel there, and had never even

picked them up, as in those days he had had no thought of diamonds.

At any rate, here was a place where a prospecting party would not be

handicapped by being followed by “claim-jumpers,” as was happening here

at Luderitzbucht, or have to contend with constantly changing mining

laws; besides, there were no Germans there, and that appealed to us

almost as much as the diamonds! But a properly organised expedition

would be necessary, and to arrange this we decided to return to Cape

Town first.

This Stuurmann was a most interesting man to talk to; he had been all

through the Hottentot campaign, and had the greatest contempt for the

fighting power of the Germans. Towards the latter end of the campaign,

he said, they had begun to learn a little and adapt themselves to the

conditions the country demanded of them; but even so he (Stuurmann)

considered that with a good commando of burghers he would take German

South-West from them any day! And this was the opinion of his mates,

between whom and the Germans there was very little love lost; though

to be but just, their employers, the Government, paid these Boer

transport-drivers extremely well.

Stuurmann also gave me much interesting detail as to the terrible

treatment meted out to the unfortunate natives, both Herero and

Hottentot, who were unlucky enough to fall into the hands of the

Germans.

I had seen something of this myself, and had heard more from ex-German

soldiers themselves, who with extraordinary callousness used to show

whole series of illustrated postcards, depicting wholesale executions

and similar gruesome doings to death of these poor natives. One of

these, that enjoyed great vogue at the time, showed a line of ten

Hottentots dangling from a single gallows, some still standing on the

packing-cases with a noose round their necks, waiting for the soldiers

to kick their last standing-place away; some kicking and writhing in

the death struggle, for the short drop did not break their necks, but

only strangled them slowly, and one having a German soldier hanging on

to his legs to finish the work more quickly. And each and every German

soldier in the photo was striking an attitude and smirking towards the

camera in pleasurable anticipation of the fine figure he would cut

when the photo was published. This, I repeat, was only one of many

that enjoyed a big sale in German South-West for the delectation of

admiring friends in the Fatherland. Absolutely no mercy was shown to

these unfortunate creatures: they were made to dig big graves, and

were shot down by the hundreds beside them, whilst practically the

whole remnant of both races who escaped this fate were exterminated in

the detention-camps at Luderitzbucht and Swakopmund. Towards the end

of the long, dragging war, the Germans conceived the plan of sending

Herero prisoners captured in the north for internment to Luderitzbucht,

where they were strangers to the country and where escape was hopeless,

whilst the Hottentots captured in the south were sent north to

Swakopmund.

There is a small low-lying promontory in Luderitz Bay known as Shark

Island, and here the Herero prisoners were crowded in thousands,

shelterless, with no proper supply of food or water: and here, huddled

together like penguins, they died like flies.

Often on a blazing day, such as is common in Luderitzbucht, they

received no water whatever, either having been forgotten, or the

supply having failed; the food(?) supplied them was never sufficient

for a tithe of them, and they often fought like wild animals and killed

each other to obtain it. There were also a large number caged in a wire

enclosure on the beach; these were slightly better off, as, although

they received no rations from the military in charge of them, a few of

their number were let out each morning and went ravenously foraging

in the refuse-buckets, bringing what offal they could back to their

starving fellow-prisoners. Cold--for the nights are often bitterly cold

there--hunger, thirst, exposure, disease, and madness claimed scores of

victims every day, and cartloads of their bodies were every day carted

over to the back beach, buried in a few inches of sand at low tide, and

as the tide came in the bodies went out, food for the sharks.

Now, Stuurmann and the other men who told me these things were no

negrophiles (a Boer as a rule has an excellent idea as to how to keep

a native in his place as the white man’s inferior), but so terrible

had been the treatment of these natives by the Germans that even these

case-hardened transport-drivers spoke of what they had seen with the

utmost horror and abhorrence. Yet these men are looked down upon as an

inferior race by the Germans, who themselves, as far as the troops and

officials in German South-West are concerned, are utterly devoid of

all humanity when dealing with natives. I saw much of the trait myself

later; it is unpleasant and distasteful, and bodes but ill for the

future relations of white and black in the German colonies.

I was by no means sorry to leave Luderitzbucht, for during the whole

of this brief stay it blew incessantly and the air was a sort of

semi-solid mixture of whirling sand, that cut and stung, and choked

and blinded, and permeated every orifice and crevice, and generally

made life utterly unbearable. When this prevailing wind reaches a

certain violence, the whole country practically gets up and walks,

big sand-dunes shift along and others come after them, like the

waves of a slowly moving sea; wide stretches of hard land are denuded

of every grain of sand, and others buried deep in it, and it is a

curious fact that these storms actually blow diamonds! A claim deep

with diamondiferous sand has often been swept clean of its contents

in a few hours; sand, gravel, and diamonds being lifted up and borne

away, to be deposited in some more favoured spot. Even the big dunes

of a hundred feet or so in height are not stationary; though their

movement is slower, it is none the less sure. In many instances these

huge sand-waves have passed slowly but irresistibly over strongly

built dwellings and the like, burying them completely for a time, and

gradually passing onward and re-disclosing them....

We came down the coast in the _Hellopes_, an alleged passenger-boat

that rolled like a hog and smelt like its sty; and we were both very

glad to see Cape Town again.

CHAPTER IV

MORE DIAMOND RUMOURS--PROSPECTING IN A MOTOR-CAR--VAN RYN’S

DORP--PROSPECTING IN EARNEST--A PATRIARCH--NEWS OF BUSHMAN’S PARADISE.

In Cape Town I found rumours of new diamond deposits were as rife

as they had been in German territory, and had scarcely rubbed the

Luderitzbucht sand from my eyes before I was called upon to go and

verify a new “discovery,” this time much nearer home.

By this time the craze had so spread that people were arguing that,

as diamonds were found in sand at Luderitzbucht, the sands all up the

coast might be full of them, and wild and indiscriminate pegging was

going on all over the place.

Amongst other local syndicates, one had been formed for the purpose of

investigating certain deposits alleged to still remain undiscovered on

both the German coast and our own, which spots were only known to the

promoter. The “plum” of these spots was an alleged deposit of “blue

ground” which the discoverer claimed to have found many years before

at a wild part of our own coast, when landing from a sealing cutter.

The exact locality was kept a dead secret, but when, one fine morning,

the papers blossomed forth with the alleged discovery of diamonds near

Lambert’s Bay, about 150 miles north-west of Cape Town, the owner of

the map declared that it was near enough to his “discovery” to render

instant action necessary.

Within a few hours the syndicate had sent for me, and the same day four

of us were jammed into a small motor-car _en route_ for the spot. “Take

nothing but what you stand in,” ordered the owner (and driver); “we

shall be back in four days!”

Cars were few and primitive in those days, and the roads we had to

traverse were as primitive as the car. For a long time the owner of

the map would not show it, or give more than a vague notion of where

we were bound; but eventually Malmesbury and Eendekuil, then the

terminus of the railway in that direction, were left behind; we climbed

the difficult pass of “Pickaneer’s Kloof” and spent the first night

dragging the rudimentary car through the sand-drifts below Macgregor’s

Pass. We broke down hopelessly at red-hot little Clanwilliam, hearing

to our dismay that there was another ahead on the same errand, and

after maddening delay splashed on again, in pouring rain, through a

terrible track leading to Van Ryn’s Dorp, along the steep mountain

slopes skirting the Olifants River. The four days we allotted for the

whole trip were taken up in reaching Van Ryn’s Dorp, a remote little

village on the road to Namaqualand, and where our car created a mild

sensation, for it was the first to be seen there. Away to the right of

the dorp towered a magnificent isolated table-mountain, its reddish

sides as sheer as gigantic walls.

The sun was just setting, and I shall never forget the marvellous

effect upon the huge buttresses of “Matsie-Kamma,” as the mountain is

called, for the towering cliffs appeared as though turned into golden

molten fire, whilst over it hovered a peculiar cloud, similar to the

“Tablecloth” of Table Mountain. Behind ran a long escarpment of similar

flat-topped mountains, and on them the glow was rapidly fading through

a whole gamut of exquisite shades between crimson, mauve, heliotrope,

and purple, till on them the sun had completely set, and they stood out

a cold clear indigo against the cinnamon and green of the sky.

But we had other things to think of besides mountains or sunsets: we

wanted to get to our “diamonds.” The car could go no farther towards

the coast, but a Cape cart could, and early next morning we were off

again, and, toiling through an awful track, we slept that night at the

“back of beyant,” the little mission station on the dreary sand-flats

of Ebenezer. By this time we had forced the “discoverer” to disclose

his map, and found we had to go to the mouth of the Olifants River,

cross it to the barren, waterless, almost unknown and uninhabited coast

north of it and find our way to a remote sealing-station some distance

up that coast.

I will not weary the reader with a recital of all the asinine things

that happened before we got to the spot, but suffice it to say that

at nightfall one evening, footsore, hungry, ragged, and half dead

with thirst, we found the little hut where the sealers lived, a most

desolate spot many miles away from drinking-water. The sealers--all

coloured men--were oily and grimy to a degree, but they looked askance

at us when we burst in upon them in the clothes we had left Cape Town

in! Tattered, torn, dusty, covered in melkbosch-juice from the thickets

we had traversed, they took us for a shipwrecked crew. It was dark by

the time we had explained what we were after.

“Blue ground!” said the foreman, an European. “Yes, it’s about half a

mile up the coast! I’ll take you to it first thing in the morning.”

“So it was right, then!” we agreed. We accepted their hospitality, and,

packed like sardines, tried to sleep on the floor of the hut, in an

atmosphere of seal oil and rotten seals, whose huge carcasses polluted

the beach for miles.

By daylight I was on the spot, peering through the raw sea-fog for the

“blue ground” we had come so far to find.

It was there, cliffs of it, millions of tons of it, blue shale, utterly

valueless, and, except in colour, bearing no atom of resemblance to

diamondiferous “blue ground”!...

It took us best part of a week to get back to Cape Town, and I swore

that nothing would ever induce me to try prospecting in a motor-car

again!

* * * * *

Even our short absence had allowed of more stories coming through as

to rich finds in German West; moreover, there were rumours as to the

finding of diamonds in Namaqualand at no great distance from the spot

we had just returned from; and a week or two later I set out alone,

with the intention of properly prospecting the country in the vicinity

of Van Ryn’s Dorp, and, if needs be, northward into Namaqualand. But

this time I did not go “as I stood,” but with a complete and compact

outfit of tent, tools, gear, and provisions for a prolonged period.

These I sent ahead by waggon to Van Ryn’s Dorp, following myself by

post cart a fortnight later, and doing the journey in half the time and

with a tithe of the discomfort I had experienced in the motor-car.

At Van Ryn’s Dorp I heard the encouraging (or disquieting) news that a

very finely equipped expedition had passed through a few days before,

going north after diamonds, which they professed to have found on a

previous trip. I therefore obtained a small donkey-waggon and team,

with a coloured driver and two boys, and pushed on to Zout River,

a stream running from the direction of Little Bushmanland into the

Olifants, and on the banks of which some years previously a fine

diamond had been found. The exact spot was at the bridge over which

ran the lonely but important road to Namaqualand and the north, and

from this spot my actual prospecting began. And from the first I

had interest of the most absorbing: for if there is any country in

the world where encouraging prospects may be found, it is in that

same north-west region. The stream facilitated prospecting, it was

crystal-clear, and with abundant water; but unfortunately, as the

name implies, it was salt, salt as brine and undrinkable even for the

donkeys! All along its banks there were “indications” of minerals,

and all alike proved to be but “indications.” Heavy gravel led to my

washing systematically all along its beds for diamonds, and finding

promising but baffling results in the sieve. Using a prospecting-pan

for possible gold gave me similar results: here and there a tiny yellow

“tail” at the end of the pan showed that gold had been there, but all

efforts to trace it to its matrix failed.

Copper there was in abundance, though in small and isolated

occurrences; here and there grains of tin showed among the black

titaniferous iron-sands of the river: and iron and galena were

everywhere. In fact, so multitudinous were these various “indications,”

and so barren of tangible result was the following-up of any and all

of them, that I began to realise that the description that had been

applied to the north-west as being the “Land of Mineral Samples” was

not much exaggerated! Still, day after day I worked along towards

the Olifants, finding my results getting poorer and my water getting

shorter every day. The whole region was most bewildering; it was as

though the waste from a big assayer’s laboratory had been dumped all

along that stream, and none of the “samples” found led to anything but

a big note of interrogation.

At last, in a tiny side-stream, I found some minute nuggets of gold,

and my hopes rose; moreover, a native “herd” whom I chanced to come

across told me that a big white reef ran right across this same stream

a few miles up, and that he had always heard there was “goud” in it. So

I abandoned my laborious panning and struck up the stream, and found a

wide quartz reef just as he had described, but no trace was there of

gold in it.

Lower down this “Zout” river I came into an astonishing region of

brilliantly coloured clays and marls, ranging in colour right through

the gamut of reds, yellows, and blues, as also a fine deposit of

milk-white Kaolin; and these in turn gave place to high banks of a sort

of volcanic mud, or ash, of a bright blue colour, through which the

stream had cut a deep bed. These high banks or mounds exactly resemble

the huge tailings of the Kimberley diamond-mines, both in appearance

and in substance: and, indeed, this deposit is apparently analogous to

Kimberlite minus its various inclusions.

I should have much liked to explore this wild and desolate part of

the country farther, but water was now our chief anxiety; moreover the

land from hereabouts was private property, upon which the hampering

restrictions of a prospecting licence did not give me the right to

prospect “without the consent of the owner!” This owner, I found from

my boys, was nothing more than a coloured man who leased the land from

Government for a few pounds per annum to run his goats on; moreover

he did not live on the property, but a good two days’ trek away, so

I did not trouble to obtain his consent. I merely mention this _en

passant_ to show by what absurd conditions a prospector is bound. Here

was a man, absolutely ignorant of minerals, and with absolutely no

right to them (for they are Crown property in such cases), and yet a

miserable lease, which only granted him surface rights, still made him

the arbiter as to whether a licensed prospector should set foot on his

10,000 morgen or so of land!

Of course there was no one to stop my prospecting, but had I done

so and made any discovery I could not have legalised it without his

consent, and being made to pay through the nose for it! The system is

utterly wrong. There are millions of acres of land in the Cape Province

held under such terms, the owners or lessees of which will neither put

a pick in themselves nor allow the prospector to.

By this time the weather was getting bitterly cold, hoar frost lying

thick every morning, and the water freezing even in my little patrol

tent. And as there was no firewood obtainable, and the two “boys” were

suffering badly at night, I decided to work upstream toward Little

Bushmanland, as I had heard that the upper reaches of this little river

had plenty of wood. So we loaded up and trekked for a day towards a

“farm” rejoicing in the name of “Douse the Glim.” In this direction

I found wood in abundance, and the “boys” built themselves a tiny

_pondhoek_ of boughs and branches, and by keeping a roaring fire going

just outside of it all night they managed to keep from freezing.

Here we had to send the donkeys a full day’s journey away for water

and grazing, and had to fill our water-barrel periodically from the

same place, and here--although in a comfortable camp--my luck was no

better than lower down the river. Samples of all sorts, “indications”

in abundance, and nothing more. Along these upper reaches, however,

I found many masses of a ferruginous gravel hardened almost into

conglomerate and containing a small portion of gold, but in no case

sufficient to pay for working in such a remote region. These gravels

are in appearance identical with certain Australian gravels which are

both gold and gem bearing, and may probably have been the source of the

diamond that had been found lower down, and of the gold I saw traces

of. During the three weeks that I had been out, thus far, I had seen

but one solitary human being except my two “boys,” the herd who had

told me of the gold reef; for, although but a day’s ride from Van Ryn’s

Dorp, the region is a very solitary and deserted one, much of the land

being _brak_ (alkaline) and unfit for stock to run on.

So that the life, though not without interest, was a very lonely as

well as a very hard one; so cold were the nights that the two blankets

I had brought utterly failed to keep me warm even when I turned in “all

standing,” and I soon abandoned my canvas camp-stretcher for a warmer

lair on the ground itself. Then at daybreak, Sam, the elder of the

“boys,” would make coffee, and with a hurried snack of food we would

start off for the day, carrying pick, shovel, sieve, and pan, and food

and water for midday. Thus I tried the whole of the adjacent country

systematically, sieving the grounds in the stream-bed and “gravitating”

them (a diamond-digger’s trick) when water was sufficient, or using

the prospecting-pan for the purpose of finding traces of gold or other

metals.

When water failed, or the “indications” occurred far from it, small

portions of the concentrates of sand and gravel would be bagged and

tied up and labelled separately, the same applying to samples of rock

taken from various parts or depths of a reef. All these samples had

in any case to be carried back to water, and, in the case of rock, to

camp, where each portion had to be carefully pounded into the finest

powder by pestle and mortar before it could be tested for the mineral

it might contain--hard and laborious work, varied by drilling holes

in hard rock for dynamite charges, or “gravitating” concentrates in

ice-cold water till the brine cracked the hands and caused most painful

sores. Then, the day’s work over, sunset would often find us miles from

camp, and we would trudge back, and load ourselves up with dry wood for

the night’s fire, and feel too tired to attempt to cook.

Boer meal was the staple food; a big three-legged pot of it boiled into

steaming “pap” made an excellent breakfast, and every few days I would

bake a batch of “roster kookies,” little flat cakes made of the same

meal with a little baking-powder to make them rise, and baked over the

embers on a “roster,” or gridiron. Or occasionally I allowed the “boys”

to make me a big loaf similar to their own, the composition being the

same, but in this case the dough was massed into a loaf shaped like a

flat Dutch cheese: the embers were thrown aside and the loaf buried in

the ashes, and covered deep in them. Bread thus baked is of course very

hard and often burnt on the outside, but when this is cut away it is

excellent.

Of fresh meat we had none, and although I gave the “boys” plenty of

such luxuries as bully beef, sardines, and golden syrup, they pined for

the flesh-pots of Egypt in the shape of their dearly loved sheep or

goat _vleesch_. But there were no sheep in the locality; and although

Sam spent the whole of a Sunday away at a farm about ten miles off, he

failed to bring any meat back. The next Sunday, however, both of them

cleared off in the early morning and did not return till nearly dark,

when they brought in a big goat between them. Within a few minutes the

head was off and buried in the ashes, and the knives were at work

cutting up a big pot of _vleesch_. Then Sam cut off a leg and brought

it to me. He spoke English quite well, did Sam. “Baas,” he said, “here

is the _geldt_; I did not pay for this bok, he was present!” “Present!”

I said, in surprise, for sheep-farmers do not usually refuse good money

for their small stock. “How was that, then, Sam? Who gave you it?”

“Nie,” he replied; “it was an ou baas of mine, I work for him once. And

this bok he little sick, so the ou baas give him for present! Baas like

me cook some _vleesch_ for him, now?” “No,” I said, with feeling; “very

good of you, Sam, but I won’t deprive you of it. Little sick, was it?

Well, well!”

All that night the camp sizzled and smoked, and certainly that “sick

bok” smelt good! They ate his head, baked in the ashes; they ate a

big potful of boiled _vleesch_, and promptly put in another; they cut

strips of him and broiled them on the embers, his internal arrangements

frizzled and smoked and were devoured by the yard. I had my cold bully

beef to the accompaniment of a really most appetising smell, smoked a

pipe and turned in, and still they ate on. Whether they ate all night I

cannot say, but certainly, when I woke again in the morning, they still

sat there eating, and the remains of the “bok” looked very sick indeed.

At length I became convinced that, whatever might exist in this wild

district, diamonds certainly did not, and I determined to make a flying

trip to the north-east, towards the long escarpment of mountains that

stretched all along the horizon in that direction, and which was

apparently the watershed from which the various rivers and streams of

the country (now mostly dry) had had their source.

[Illustration: T’SAMMA IN THE DUNES.]

[Illustration: IN THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN KALAHARI.]

There were no roads in the right direction, and the country was too

rugged to allow of using the cart, so I determined to “hump my swag.”

Leaving one man in camp, I took Sam with me, and we carried food for

six days (kookies, biltong, and the like), a small trenching tool,

sieve and pan, a canvas bag and water-bottle and a blanket. Even

this minimum of necessities meant at least 50 lb. weight for each man,

and was more than was comfortable for such rough country and long

distances as we were bent on covering; but it was our only chance of

visiting a certain valley where again diamonds were supposed to exist,

and which I had set my heart on visiting. We found, as is usual in

such cases, that the mountains seemed to recede as we progressed, and

although we did a good fifteen miles before night, we appeared very

little nearer them. During the whole day we saw no human being, though

we saw sheep once on the flank of a kopje: nor did we find a drop of

water the whole distance, much of which was up the courses of dried-up

streams.