these latter; and, making a wind-break of bushes and a big fire, we
tried to make ourselves comfortable for the night. Luckily the spot
was sandy, and we scooped a sort of bed in it that looked unpleasantly
like a grave, and was within roasting distance of the fire; and with
plenty of dry wood at arm’s reach, and my one blanket well tucked round
me, I fell asleep almost immediately. I woke up about an hour later
with my blanket smouldering on one side of me, whilst my other side was
apparently frost-bitten. A wind had sprung up and was blowing sparks
and embers all over me, whilst Sam snored peacefully and in safety on
the other side. Whilst I was making new arrangements, I was startled
by a man stepping into the firelight. He was a poor tatterdemalion of
a Hottentot, clothed in nothing but a few rags, and literally blue
with cold and famished with hunger. I woke the reluctant Sam, and he
made a billy of coffee, part of which warmed the poor shivering wretch
enough to enable him to talk. He spoke but a few words of Dutch, but
Sam understood his “click” language and interpreted. He said he had
been working for a prospecting party a long day’s trek to the north,
but had “earned enough,” and was on his way back to Calvinia, where he
belonged. He had expected to find _trek boeren_ at some old water-pits
an hour or two north of where we were, but found the “pits” dry and
the place deserted. And with the usual improvidence of a native, he
had eaten all his food and drunk all his water before he got there,
and would certainly have had a bad time had he not seen our fire. I
questioned him about the prospecting party, who apparently were the men
I had heard of in Van Ryn’s Dorp. “Yes,” he said, “they were looking
for ‘blink klippers’ (bright stones) in a sand river, and finding them
too, lots of them.”
What with this piece of news, and the cold, and the dodging of sparks
and embers made necessary by a change of wind about every half an hour,
I rested very little that night.
In the morning I gave the Hottentot a plug of tobacco and a little of
our precious water, for he informed us we should find some about an
hour farther on in the direction we were going, and he set out quite
light-heartedly on his eighty-mile tramp “home.” He was literally “as
he stood,” an old battered tin water-bottle appeared to be his only
possession; but he had some money tied up in his rags, and offered to
buy some more of my coveted plug _tabaki_, which I could not spare him.
Few of these Ishmaelite Hottentots can be prevailed upon to work for
any length of time; a week or two, and they want the few shillings due
to them, and away they trek to the nearest dorp, be it even 150 miles
away, where mouth-organs, tobacco, golden syrup, or other delicacies
dear to the native soon account for their little hard-earned cash.
Seldom indeed do they buy a blanket or make any provision for the cold
weather that they feel so bitterly. And pneumonia and kindred chest
troubles carry them off wholesale.
An hour farther on we found the water he had spoken of. It was a
small and nearly dry pit, and the bucket or two of water left in it
was filled with squirming animalcules. But the little we carried was
getting perilously low, and we made a fire and boiled a billy of it
for coffee, straining it through a handkerchief, and getting quite a
tablespoonful of mosquito larvæ and other weird things in the process.
Still, the coffee was drinkable in spite of a strong animal taste,
and all might have been well had I not had the temerity to look at
those animalcules through my prospecting glass afterwards. I was sorry
immediately, but it was too late--the coffee had been drunk.
That evening, footsore and dog-tired, we straggled into a narrow sandy
valley between rocky kopjes, the foothills of a big mountain behind and
the spot long reputed to be rich in diamonds. There was not a scrap of
wood, not a bush or a bit of vegetation anywhere, nor could we find any
of the dry cow-droppings which can be used as an alternative fuel. We
had scarcely a pint of water between us, and had to reserve that for
the morrow, and long before the end of a bitterly cold night I would
have given my chance of any diamonds I was likely to find for an armful
of firewood or a cup of hot coffee.
It is seldom very dark on the wide spaces of the veldt, but the night
was of inky blackness, and rain threatened in all directions; and as
we huddled up under the shelter of a big rock the wind swept howling
round us, chilling us to the very bone. Occasionally a few drops
of rain fell, but luckily the threatened storm kept off, and after
an interminable period of fitful naps, punctuated by an occasional
tramp up and down to warm our half frozen limbs, the bright “morning
star” that heralds the dawn rose and showed cheerily through the
lightening clouds. Still, it seemed an endless time to daybreak, and
all my attempts to cheer myself with visions of a possible Golconda
to reward me brought me but scant comfort. With morning, cold, bleak,
and cheerless as a bad November day in Europe, we started up the sand
river, finding almost immediately large masses of rock garnet and
countless quartz crystals, bright, glittering, but of course quite
valueless. And though I put in a long, thirsty day, till well on in
the afternoon, searching and sieving, not a particle of anything else
did I find to warrant the “diamondiferous” reputation of that wretched
valley. Meanwhile I had sent Sam with our water-bottles to a kloof he
knew of a couple of hours’ journey away, where he had found water on a
previous visit; and late in the afternoon he returned with sufficient
to make a billy of coffee, for the fuel for which he brought a small
bundle of laboriously collected twigs. As I had seen quite enough of
this “Sindbad’s Valley” by this time, we struck out for home, not
following our previous route, but striking straight across more open
country to the north-west. Except that we found sufficient wood before
dark to make a fire that lasted only long enough to tantalise us (and
make us feel colder than ever, afterwards!), this night was a replica
of the previous one, and I determined that, if I had to spend another
night on the veldt, I would at all costs make for a spot where wood was
to be found, if such were possible. However, late that afternoon, and
when we were still a good ten miles or more of rough country from our
camp, Sam climbed one of the isolated granite kopjes that form such a
feature of that part of Klein Namaqualand and Little Bushmanland, and
yelled out that he could see a “house.” It turned out to be the canvas
“house” of a trek Boer, who, with his small flock of sheep and a few
oxen, had pitched his portable residence at some old abandoned pits
that a lucky shower had partly filled with water, and near which, at
the foot of a big kopje, we found enough wood to keep us fairly warm
that night.
He was a most naïve sort of old chap, typical of the degenerate “poor
white” trek Boer of these barren, desolate and almost uninhabited
wastes, appallingly ignorant and indescribably dirty. His canvas
“house” was about 15 feet square, and in it he and his enormous wife,
two grown sons and three strapping daughters lived, slept, and had
their being. He questioned me minutely as to who I was, where I came
from, whether I was married, how many children I had, etc., and at
each and all of my answers in broken Dutch he and his whole tribe
laughed immoderately. He himself, as he proudly told me, had seen an
Engelsman before, often, but not so his children. I gave him a little
tobacco, which he had not seen for some weeks, and offered to buy a
goat from him to kill for our general benefit, but this he would not
sell; in fact, I always found it extremely difficult to get these
“back-of-beyant” farmers to sell any of their scanty small stock at
any price. They lived entirely upon milk and Boer meal, which they
ground themselves in a small flat stone hand-mill, catching the meal
in a goat-skin below. In fact they were as primitive, practically, as
the Bushman of the desert; more primitive certainly than the patriarch
Abraham, after whom the old man was named. I had sent Sam on to the
spot where he had seen the wood, to make a _Scherm_ and a big fire for
the night, but the old man wanted badly for me to sleep in his house!
Seven adults--and four of them women--all in a tiny room where there
were also several fowls, two big lurchers, and a sick kid! The fact of
there being any impropriety in my sharing a room with all his womenfolk
certainly never entered his head, and he evidently thought me quite mad
to choose the cold night outside to the “warmth” and comfort (?) of his
_huis_. Thanks to the roaring fire, we put in a fairly good night, and
afternoon of the next day saw us back in camp--none too soon, for my
stout boots had given in and I was wellnigh barefooted.
Next day I struck camp and started back to Van Ryn’s Dorp, disheartened
with my fruitless search and eager for news, for I had heard nothing
for six weeks.
In the dorp I found letters from Cape Town, telling me of still more
marvellous finds in German South-West, for now parties had struck south
from Luderitzbucht, and the fabulously rich Pomona fields were upon
everyone’s lips. There was talk of a bucketful of diamonds having been
impounded and lying in the “Deutsche Bank” waiting for a decision as
to their rightful owner; of the first prospectors picking up diamonds
by the handful, filling their pockets with them (which they literally
did!). And I thought of Jim and his offer to take us south, and wept
and would not be comforted!
The local news was startling, too; diamonds, and prospecting for them,
were on everybody’s lips, and rumour was persistent that a large number
of stones had been found by the party who had gone north. One of these
prospectors, it appeared, had passed through the dorp post-haste on his
way back to Cape Town, and had let drop many hints as to the richness
of his finds. One man solemnly assured me that, although he had not
seen the actual stones, he had been shown a fragment of the rock with
the holes in it from which they had been picked, like currants from
a bun! “There was the shape of the facets quite plain,” he concluded
triumphantly, and there were many other “confirmations” of a like
nature. But, absurd as most of these rumours were, there appeared to
be too much smoke to be quite without fire, and I determined to try
to reach that prospecting party and see what truth there might be in
it. But its exact whereabouts was hard to discover till by luck a
waggon came in from a distant part of the backveld within a few miles
of where this party were working. These waggoners were bastards of a
queer breed, German on the father’s side with a Hottentot mother, and
their Dutch was worse than my own--which sweeping assertion I make with
all due consideration. And as a result we got on very well together,
and they agreed to go as soon as they had had their burst out, and got
their provisions in.
Three days did this, and taking nothing but some food and my sleeping
gear, I turned back again with these peculiar mongrels, who were still
so full and reeking of bad _dop_ that I was afraid to smoke anywhere
near their breath. They were genial kind of savages, however, and
once the _dop_ was finished we got on very well together. We had to
make a detour by way of their dwelling, a canvas _huis_ similar to
friend Abraham’s, but decidedly cleaner, and where I slept cosily on
the corn-sacks in the waggon; and three days after leaving the dorp
I came up to the prospecting party, in very wild country, at a place
called Davedas. I heard them blasting long before I reached them,
and extending to them the prospector’s etiquette learnt in an older
country, I did not go near their shaft, but sent one of the drivers to
say that I should like one of the “baases” to come over to my waggon.
He came back telling me that he had been told to _voetsack_, and a few
minutes afterwards a white man came across to me and surlily told me
to do the same. I politely told him that all I wanted to know was how
far his ground extended and where his pegs stood, and he explained
that the whole earth was his and that I could get to hell out of it.
Altogether he was a most polished and obliging kind of chap. Meanwhile
the men had outspanned, and here we stayed the night. After dark
several of the “boys” came down to our fire, and to my astonishment
and delight I recognised one Jonas, a Cape boy who had worked for me
on the diggings some three years before. He was as pleased as I was,
and told me all about it. He said that, as far as he knew, not a single
diamond had been found, nor had there been any trace of diamondiferous
ground or “wash,” except in a sand river some miles back on the road.
As for where they were sinking a shaft, well, he thought they might
be after copper, for they had gone down on green stains in a quartz
reef in granite, but as for diamonds----? As all this coincided with
and confirmed what I could see of the country itself, I decided not to
trouble about the matter, and get back as soon as possible. So I gave
Jonas enough twist tobacco to make him happy, and having heard how one
of his “baases” had met me, he went back with the avowed intention of
“putting the wind up” that same surly individual.
What peculiar variety of lie he used I don’t know, but it was
effective, for the next morning he turned up with a broad grin, and a
bottle of milk, and a polite message as to where the pegs were.
Later I went round and looked at them; they were all base mineral
licences. And as I saw no use for base minerals hundreds of miles from
a railway, and as the ground showed no trace of anything else, I turned
back towards Van Ryn’s Dorp. At the sand river and at a weird-looking
spot known as “Dood Drenk” I found traces that the sand had been
worked, but as half a day’s sieving found nothing, I gave up all hope
of and all belief in diamonds existing in that locality.
There was no chance of getting back to Cape Town for a few days, and
whilst waiting for the post cart I heard something that again sent my
hopes sky-high, for a time!
I had bought a few stores on previous visits at a small local
store-keeper’s named C. He was a Jew, and had all the curiosity and
enterprise of his extraordinary race. And one evening he came to me in
a most mysterious manner, and after a lot of circumlocution he told me
that if I liked to join him in a trip he would show me a big diamond
“as big as the top of his thumb,” and take me to the place where it had
been found. And after a great deal of talk he showed me a scrawl from
a customer of his in the district, which conveyed such intelligence.
This man, he explained, was an old coloured man who had been granted a
piece of land somewhere on the northern bank of the Olifants River, on
Government ground there, and not far distant from gravels that I had
seen and thought well of on my previous trip. C. had several messages
to come out and see the stone, and all his efforts to get the old man
to bring his precious treasure-trove in had failed, as the finder had
heard of the I.D.B. Act, and feared the police would take both him and
the stone. Well, it took time to make C. understand the provisions of
that Act, but eventually he followed my advice and took out a licence
himself, and the pair of us set out for the scene of the find, quite
prepared to peg the whole country.
The weather had turned both wet and colder, and the discomforts of
that three days’ trip in an open cart to Olifants Drift, Ebenezer,
and thence in a boat to a lonely part of the north bank of the river,
I shall never forget; but suffice to say that at length, cold, wet,
tired, and generally disgusted, we stood in a native _pondhoek_ before
a frightened old nigger, who, being repeatedly assured that I was not a
policeman, and only wanted to see the “diamond” and where it came from,
at length dug up from the floor of his hut a tiny tobacco-bag from
which, rolled in a whole volume of rags, he eventually produced a big,
bright, but utterly worthless quartz crystal!
Disheartened and disillusioned, I turned back towards Van Ryn’s Dorp,
but my luck was dead out, for scarcely had I passed Olifants Drift when
the cart got badly smashed up and I was forced to bivouac for four days
on the veldt.
It was a wild and lonely spot, and during the first two days of my
enforced wait I saw no one, but on the third I woke to find the whole
veldt alive with a magnificent flock of beautiful fleecy Angora goats.
They were trekking north, and after 3,000-odd of them had passed with
their “herds,” a very fine Cape cart hove in sight with their owner. He
proved to be a certain Mr. Brand, a nephew of the late president of the
O.R.F.S., who had for many years been farming in the Gibeon District
of German South-West Africa. He had been to Cape Town to buy these
Angoras, with which he intended stocking his farm experimentally, and
was trekking with them over the 800-odd miles of wild country between
Table Bay and his lonely home.
He had plenty of time, and stayed a whole day with me, and when he
heard what I had been after he told me a tale that almost sent me back
to the wilds of German territory again. It was the tale of the first
discovery of diamonds in German South-West, years before they were
found in Luderitzbucht, a tale of a German soldier on patrol, separated
from his comrades and lost in a blinding sand-storm. He had struggled
on for days, lost to all sense of direction, and when at his last gasp
had been found by wandering Bushmen, and taken to an oasis in the
desert, where not only was there an abundance of water, but diamonds
by the thousand. Here he was kept captive, but eventually escaped and
got back to Swakopmund, where he had been struck off the rolls as dead.
His one idea was to organise an expedition to go to this spot for the
diamonds, but no one believed him; his tale was laughed at, and it was
thought that his sufferings in the desert had driven him mad.
One fine day he was missing again, and it was found he had taken mules
and a considerable amount of water, and no more was heard of him, until
some months later his body was found in the sands near Swakopmund,
bloated and swollen with the poison of a Bushman’s arrow, that had
pierced him through and through. His rags of clothing had been rifled,
but in an old pocket-book near was found a rough diary he had kept of
his route, and four large rough diamonds.
This was the tale that Brand told me, and this had been the origin of
the belief of the existence of the oasis usually known as “Hottentots’
(or Bushmen’s) Paradise” to which I have previously alluded, and the
search for which from Luderitzbucht had already cost several lives.
Well, Mr. Brand assured me that he was one of the four men who had
seen both the diamonds and the pocket-book with the original map. And,
seeing I was keenly interested, he said, “Why not go after it yourself?
I will help find the money. But you must take camels and work from the
coast. And you must land near Hollam’s Bird Island, at Strandlooper’s
Water, and go straight east.” And although I had not told Brand so,
this was close to the spot at which we had searched the beach, and from
the dunes of which Du Toit has seen an oasis in the heart of the dunes
eastward. So that, although I abandoned the Van Ryn’s Dorp district as
a bad job, I had much food for thought on my way back to Cape Town.
CHAPTER V
“ANDERSON’S DIAMONDS”--PRIESKA, UPINGTON--THE SOUTHERN KALAHARI.
In Cape Town I heard that the prospecting craze had reached Port
Nolloth, that the whole of the beach there had been pegged, and that
parties of prospectors had spread northward up the coast towards
the Orange River. Apparently, therefore, Du Toit and myself were
forestalled in our cherished scheme of trying the gravels along the
lower reaches of that little-known stream; but I wrote immediately to
my old partner, telling him of all I had heard from Brand, and asking
him to join me in an organised attempt to reach Bushmen’s Paradise.
Unfortunately, however, my letter crossed one of his announcing his
immediate sailing from Durban for Australia, and I never heard from him
again.
Such an expedition as I proposed would undoubtedly have located the
spot had it existed, but whilst the scheme was yet in embryo I had an
offer which drove all thoughts of it out of my head for some months.
One day I was asked to examine a small collection of stones brought
from a remote part of the Kalahari Desert, and give an opinion as
to what kind of deposit they might denote. And I found this little
“parcel” to consist of an almost complete assortment of various
minerals usually found in or associated with diamondiferous “blue
ground”--or Kimberlite. Garnet, olivine, chrome-diopside, ilmenite
(often called “carbon”), all were there, as well as one or two of the
rarer minerals generally found in the same company; and although there
were a few extraneous fragments of other stones having no bearing on or
connection with the rest, I had no hesitation in saying that if they
had all been found together they certainly denoted an occurrence of
“blue ground” in the immediate vicinity.
I was then told the romantic story of their discovery, a tale of forty
years back, of a time when diamonds had but recently been discovered in
Kimberley, and little was known of the true nature of the pipes there.
At that time a traveller named Anderson, who had seen the new mines,
entered the Kalahari on an exploring and shooting expedition--one
of many he made in that region--and somewhere in the vicinity of
Hachschein Vley he had come upon a valley enclosed by rocks similar to
those forming the walls of the Kimberley mines, and a slight excavation
he had been able to make in the limestone capping had produced not only
these samples, but “hundreds of garnets,” and certain green gem-stones
that he had afterwards sold in Cape Town. The hostility of a native
tribe in the vicinity had prevented his following up his discovery, and
he had been forced to leave the spot, to which he had always intended
to return, but had never been able. He was now dead, and certain of his
papers, including a description of the spot and how to reach it, a map
and the samples, were now in the possession of the gentleman who had
shown them to me.
The opinion expressed by me as to the probable source of the stones
was corroborated by several well-known geologists; an expedition to
endeavour to locate the spot was finally decided upon, and I was
commissioned to undertake it.
Now, the Kalahari is practically what it was in Anderson’s day (though
since then the whole of it has become British), and the Bushmen
that were a menace to the old traveller, though still existing, are
a dying and scattered race, too few and too timid to be taken into
consideration to-day.
And though an examination of the old map showed the spot to be
marked in close proximity to where the most northern of our border
camel police posts has since Anderson’s day been established, the
region is still wild, remote, and very little known, so little, indeed,
that it was almost impossible to obtain any exact information in Cape
Town as to the best route to follow to get there.
In those days, and indeed up till after the war broke out, Prieska
formed the railway terminus in that direction; beyond it there
stretched 150 miles of very bad, almost waterless country, wellnigh
uninhabited, before Upington could be reached; and even when this
little border dorp on the Orange River was arrived at, it was but the
“kicking-off place” for the Southern Kalahari, and a good 200 miles
of the desert had to be traversed before the truth of the traveller’s
tale could be confirmed or otherwise. So here was an adventure worth
having; a long trek through a little-known country, almost untouched
by the prospector, with sport and adventure _en route_, and who knew
what riches waiting to be discovered at the end of it? And within
forty-eight hours of the decision to send us, my fellow-adventurer
and myself were ready for our long trip. Except the lightest of
prospecting-gear, arms and ammunition, and a box of stores, we took but
little from Cape Town, for the trip was in no sense meant to include a
long stay at the spot--simply a verification of its existence, and as
rapid a return as possible to the nearest base of communication to send
word of the result.
The few people in the concern who had ever been farther than Upington
warned us that we were mad to attempt the journey at such a time, one
of the hottest months of the year, telling us awful yarns of the thirst
we were likely to suffer, and counselling a wait of some months till
the cooler season; but the promoters were eager for the mine, and urged
the danger of delay, as at any time the place might be stumbled on
(after its forty years of waiting). And we were as eager as were they!
So one fine summer’s day the north-bound mail carried us 500 miles
north-east to De Aar, whence we pottered for half a day back at an
obtuse angle, east, about 100 miles to Prieska, when the train journey
ended and the trek began.
Few years ago as it was, at that time there was not even a motor-car
service to either Kenhardt, Upington, Kakamas, or any of the far
townships of the German border. Twice a week a post-cart jogged
over the apology for a road, with letters to the “backveld,” and
occasionally a commercial traveller followed the same path; but
wayfarers of any description other than local farmers or stock-buyers
were rare enough to make us the object of a considerable amount of
curiosity, and during the few hours we stayed in the little “border”
dorp the place was humming with rumours as to who we were and where we
were bound for.
We had been warned that this kind of thing would happen, and that if
our true object leaked out we should be followed--perhaps forestalled.
And I must say that for naïve and insatiable inquisitiveness into
the doings of strangers, the inhabitants of the wild and neglected
districts of the north-west are very hard to beat. At the lonely and
poverty-stricken farmsteads all along the route we were invariably
subjected to a regular inquisition, as to who we were, where we came
from, where we were going, and above all, why, why, why had we come
into those parts? Why? indeed! For there appeared little or nothing to
attract anyone to this desolate and barren countryside, devastated by
drought, neglected and ignored, without any of the conveniences of more
favoured regions, a very Cinderella among South African districts. The
advent of a rare stranger--especially if he looked a townsman and an
“Engelsman”--usually gave rise to some faint hope that at length the
_spoorweg_ (railway) was coming, or roads were to be made, or a mine
opened, or some kind of _Gouvermentse werk_ to be started to benefit
the country at long last.
But after all, we had little to fear from these poor chaps; the danger
came from the townsmen we had left, for our coming and our object were
both known in Upington before we got there, and all arrangements had
been made for our being followed. However, I anticipate.
We succeeded in hiring a light spring-waggon with six good horses, and
the fourth day saw us at the drift at Upington, having passed through
one of the most dreary and monotonous parts of South Africa _en route_,
a part calling for no special mention, as it is utterly devoid of
scenery or of any object of interest. Dreary stretches of flat stony
veldt, incredibly bare, and denuded of even its modicum of straggling
vegetation, for miles on either side of the road, by the crowds of
donkeys that then hauled the heavy transport-waggons from the railway
to the far back-veldt, and which crawled along at a snail’s pace over
the interminable distance, often taking three weeks to accomplish the
150 miles between Prieska and Upington.
Luckily we were in no such case, but trundled comfortably along,
doing our thirty-five or fifty miles a day, outspanning at night and
sleeping under the cart, and getting seasoned for the real work of
the desert farther north. On our right hand, most of the journey, ran
a long line of barren hills; these denoted the course of the Orange
River, which we left at Prieska and did not see again till we reached
Upington. Altogether a most dreary and monotonous journey so far,
and by no means the “joy-ride” we anticipated, the only pleasurable
incident being when the surly driver sat on a scorpion by the camp
fire one evening. However, at last the dreary stretches of sad-looking
veldt, varied only by heavy sand, became broken by a few prominent
granite kopjes, and eventually, on cresting a low stony ridge, we came
in sight of the long winding belt of vegetation denoting the Orange
River. On its far (northern) bank, white houses were dotted along in
a thin straggling line; this was Upington. Beyond, as far as the eye
could reach, stretched a vast, slowly rising, undulating expanse of
sad, dun-coloured, featureless country, the southern dunes of the
Kalahari, the “Great Thirst Land”--the land we were bound for, and
in the wilds of which we hoped to find a fortune. Away to our left,
westward and at a great distance, rose a line of jagged fantastic
peaks, pale cobalt against the white glare of the sky; these peaks I
had cause to know only too intimately later. They were the Noup Hills,
an almost unexplored maze of low mountains situated below the Great
Falls of the Orange and just on the border of German South-West, some
seventy miles distant from us. Before reaching the very welcome river,
however, we had to toil through a terrible “drift” of the softest, most
powdery sand and silt that ever hampered a team even in this country
of sand-drifts; it was a sort of sand-quagmire, in fact, if such a
thing is imaginable, and in it the waggon sank up to the hubs, and
progress was most maddeningly slow. This silt is really that brought
down and spread out on either side of the river by successive floods,
and is, wherever irrigated, most astonishingly fertile. Once through
it, and amongst magnificent trees we came to the river, this most
welcome oasis between two deserts; for the southern country is quite as
well-deserving of the name as the true Kalahari of the northern bank.
In flood-time it is a broad and noble stream with some magnificent
stretches of water, often 400 yards or more in width, but at the time
of our arrival it was low, and we were able to drive through its
shallow _drifts_ and climb out on the north bank without recourse to
the pontoon by which it is usually crossed. Along its bank’s summit
runs the straggling street, knee-deep almost in Kalahari sand. A
“hotel,” post and telegraph office, a church or two, and quite a number
of large stores made the one street; these stores I found wonderfully
well stocked considering their 150 miles’ distance from a railway, and
apparently far too numerous for the inhabitants’ requirements. Many of
them had sprung into being during the German-Hottentot-Herrero War,
when Upington had flourished exceedingly on the enormous amount
of transport passing through it on the way to the German border.
Since those palmy days things had slumped, most of the store-keepers
apparently living on each other and all uniting in praying for a new
war. They had great hopes when Ferreira broke across the border in his
German-inspired, abortive raid, but unfortunately for them it ended in
smoke.
[Illustration: A FLOWER OF THE DESERT, SOUTHERN KALAHARI.
Flowering succulent, about 3 feet high.]
[Illustration: THE CAMEL POST AT ZWARTMODDER, GORDONIA.]
The proximity to the German border was rendered noticeable in Upington
principally on account of the prevalence of German money there.
Practically no English silver was to be seen, and except at the post
office the cheap, trashy-looking mark passed for and purchased the
equivalent amount of a shilling’s-worth.
I have already alluded to the fertility of the silt on the banks of
the Orange River, but scarcely believed the statements of some of
the inhabitants until, later, I saw with my own eyes the marvellous
crops that it is capable of producing. Oranges, especially the variety
known as the “Washington Navel,” grow to a profusion, perfection, and
abundance truly wonderful, as do peaches, grapes, and in fact almost
every variety of fruit; though both soil and climate seem to favour the
various varieties of citrus most of all.
Between the trees of the carefully cultivated groves the farmers grow
lucerne, which again thrives astonishingly, crop following crop almost
as fast as it is cut, eight or nine times a year being quite common.
Unfortunately, the irrigable land consists of a comparatively narrow
strip averaging about half a mile in width, though there are spots
where it is much wider, and in many places the river is split up into
numerous channels enclosing densely wooded islands, which, wherever
cleared and cultivated, give the same abundant crops. Lower down the
river a certain amount of grain is grown, and it is claimed that
wheat has here yielded the wonderful harvest of 246 bushels for one
of seed--surely a world’s record? Altogether it needs no prophet to
predict that the time will come when this long, winding oasis through
the desert will be populated and utilised from end to end, as it
deserves to be. But except for a brief drive or two we saw but little
of this fertile belt on this visit, for within twenty-four hours of
our arrival we were _en route_ again, this time in a Cape cart drawn
by eight sturdy oxen, who are far better able to cope with heavy sand
than are horses or mules, and whose steady, untiring walk or jog-trot
gets them over the ground at a far quicker rate than would appear.
As we were now entering a region where water is at its scarcest, we
carried a considerable quantity of this prime necessity, a small cask,
several tin cans, and a big canvas water-bag and aluminium water-bottle
each. Our driver was a Boer who had been in the camel police, and knew
the road to the north well, and for _voorleir_ we had a diminutive
Hottentot Bushman boy with the most marvellous eyesight imaginable.
Often this queer, monkey-faced little chap would call our attention to
game far ahead of us, the long neck of a _paauw_ among the bushes, a
good 500 yards away, and which our field-glasses hardly showed us, or a
tiny _steenbok_ standing motionless among cover at double the distance;
and his dexterity at picking up a spoor and following it was almost
superhuman.
He knew each and every hoof-mark of his own eight charges even when
they were mixed up with hundreds of others at the various water-holes,
and he often pointed out the spoor of animals in the hard stony places
that occasionally divided the dunes, and where the closest scrutiny of
my own fairly good eyes showed me nothing. He was a source of perpetual
interest to me, and taught me a good deal of veldt lore on that long
trudge to the north. But our driver was by no means a pleasant man;
he was a taciturn and bad-tempered individual who hated and despised
all Englishmen and took little pains to conceal the fact, and within
twenty-four hours of leaving Upington I was hard at work trying to
keep the peace between him and my companion. The latter was a young
Englishman, an accountant from Cape Town who had put in a good veldt
apprenticeship in the B.B.P. in Rhodesia, and who, finding our driver
would not be companionable, wanted to punch him. This I would have
been very pleased to let him do thoroughly, but having left Upington,
and with no other team or teamster to replace him, it would have been
extremely bad policy. Moreover in some cases he was not at fault!
For instance, G. was constantly accusing him of cruelty to his oxen,
but this was only apparent, or in some cases necessary. G. wanted to
push forward, as I did, and could not understand the arbitrary manner
in which we trekked, outspanning in awful spots for hours in the sun
without an atom of shade, pushing on in the dark when G. wanted to
sleep, and above all stopping for hours in the night to sleep, and
keeping the oxen tight-spanned in their heavy yokes. This “unnecessary
cruelty,” as G. termed it, annoyed him so much that one night when we
were all asleep he quietly let them loose, “so that they could have a
good sleep, poor things,” as he put it. A few hours later, when inspan
time came, there was trouble, for the “poor things” had cleared, some
on the back trail for home, two old hands straight ahead to the next
water-hole, and the rest due east into the real dunes of the forbidden
Game Reserve, where there was an abundance of grass. The result was a
day’s delay in retrieving them, and in future G. admitted the driver
knew his own business best. Indeed, trekking in these deserts is an
art in itself, bound by laws that are only known to men who know the
roads intimately; and to attempt to trek a certain number of hours,
and outspan a certain number of regular times, is out of the question.
In the hottest time of the day, when the sand is almost red-hot, the
oxen cannot and will not trek; then, whatever happens, at sunrise and
sunset they must be loosed and rested for a while, and the problem is
made more difficult by the necessity of finding grazing for them _en
route_, and, above all, watering them. Much of our trekking was done
at night, when oxen travel well, but this was a great drawback in many
ways, as it left us ignorant of much of the country travelled through.
All up the border, which, as I have before written, is the 20th degree
of east longitude, there stretches a narrow fringe of desert “farms,”
many of them huge blocks of 20,000 morgen (roughly 40,000 acres)
each, mostly, too, of barren, sandy, waterless land, “farms” indeed
only in name. Some of them have one or two water-holes, some have
none whatever. A few have so-called “homesteads” on them, generally a
forlorn dwelling little better than a hovel, though there are one or
two exceptions of a better type. But wild and desolate as are these
stretches of land, many of them are capable of sustaining large flocks
of sheep, goats, and cattle; indeed, the number of fat beasts running
on certain of these inhospitable-looking wastes is surprising. And
the “poverty” of the scattered inhabitants is not nearly as bad as it
appears, their wretched homes and the squalor of their surroundings
being almost as inexcusable as their appalling filth. This latter was
the more noticeable at some of the farms along the Molopo, the dry bed
of which eventually forms the route north, where water can always be
found on boring. Often there is an aeromotor and a well-built stone
dam full of water, stagnant and filthy and full of animalcules for the
want of cleaning out; and from this filthy pestiferous brew the owners
would dip the drinking-water for their needs, rather than take the
two minutes’ trouble of unhitching the motor and getting a splendid
stream of crystal water, flowing pure and fresh from the abundant
supply below. Of course there were exceptions, but the bulk of these
degenerate people apparently never dreamed of washing themselves,
except when they made their periodical visit to _nachtmaal_ at
far-distant Upington. The vicinity of one of these “farms” was usually
heralded by an appalling smell, for generally in the near vicinity were
to be seen several swollen, rotten carcasses of goats, cattle, sheep,
or horses, dead of _lungziekte_ or _nieuwziekte_ or _paardeziekte_, or
one of the many diseases that had recently devastated the animals in
these parts.
No matter how near they might have died to house or water, no attempt
appeared ever to have been made to drag the putrid carcass away or bury
it, and the offal of slain animals usually strewed the vicinity of the
house to the very doorstep. Quite recently an epidemic of typhoid had
devastated the whole of this border region, and I believe many learned
treatises were written as to what peculiar form of fever it may have
been and how it originated--but surely the cause was not far to seek!
However, we jogged steadily along, and after one or two experiences
gave these places as wide a berth or as short a visit as we possibly
could, and this much to our driver’s disgust, for naturally he wished
to visit all of them, spend an hour or two in gossiping at each,
and whenever possible sleep in the ferret-hutch atmosphere of their
interiors at night, instead of out under the stars as we did. Still,
_De gustibus non disputandum_ holds good in Gordonia as elsewhere, I
suppose, and as long as he did not delay us and kept his distance for a
while afterwards, we did not mind where he slept.
It is not my intention to turn this account into a guide-book
description of the journey, most of which was absolutely featureless
and uninteresting, but a brief outline of the route followed might be
of interest.
Trekking from Upington at 5 one evening, we kept on steadily till 11,
when we turned in on the cool sand and slept comfortably till 4.30,
when we started again, and at 7 o’clock passed the deserted copper-mine
at Areachap, which had but recently been closed down, and presented the
sad sight of a beautifully equipped and rich little mine being beaten
in its struggle for existence by the heavy handicap of being situated
170 miles or so from the nearest railway. Rich heaps of ore lay there
ready to be carted away, there was much valuable machinery going to
rack and ruin, and the buildings must have cost a large sum to erect;
and here it stood, alone and deserted in the midst of the solitary
waste of veldt, guarded only by a couple of coloured “boys”--a sad
monument of man’s energy wasted in a hopeless fight against adverse
circumstances, or worse! The tall yellow shaft was visible hours after
we had left it, a most prominent and incongruous landmark in the wide
expanse of desert.
A mile or so farther on we found that rain had fallen, and at the
pools of shallow water lying in the road were Namaqua partridges by
the thousand. These little plump, pretty game-birds are really a
sand-grouse, and to such an extent do they abound in these districts
that at the rare water-holes and at their drinking hours the air is
literally full of them. An hour or two after sunrise and again at
sunset they come to the water, huge coveys of them whirring in from
all directions, and swarming towards the drinking-place in incredible
numbers. In the stone-strewn _aars_ that are a feature of this country
these little birds take advantage of their marvellous protective
colouring, and I have often actually kicked against them crouching
amongst, and absolutely indistinguishable from, the stones around them
until they moved, when a whole covey would whirr up from beneath my
feet. The driver frequently killed them with his whip from his seat on
the cart, and we called down upon us his derision by shooting a few
single ones that we put up by the path. He told us that was by no means
the way, and that with one cartridge he would fill the pot for us,
which of course he easily did by hiding behind a bush near the water
and firing into the thick of them. Indeed, it is no uncommon thing to
bag fifty or more at a shot in this manner, and though far from being
“sport,” we soon found that on a long trip where ammunition could not
be replenished it would scarcely pay to pot at single partridges; and
in future we kept our big Kaffir pot filled with them by this most
unsportsmanlike but profitable method. A bit of bacon, an onion, a
little pepper and salt, and a potful of these little chaps, make a stew
fit for a king, and with plenty of Boer meal “pap” and syrup and roster
kook, G. and I sighed for nothing better; but the driver turned up his
nose at the despised _vogelkies_ and pined for his beloved _vleesch_.
Whenever he could get a chunk of goat or sheep he filled a pot and ate
to repletion of the half-cooked, tough, and flavourless contents. When
he could not get it, and perforce had to eat the birds, a dozen of them
were but a sort of appetiser to him. As a beverage we drank tea, quarts
and quarts of it, made in the kettle itself, without milk and with an
abundance of sugar, for this was a trip _de luxe_, during which neither
food nor water ran short.
On the third day two white men overtook and passed us, on horseback,
not keeping the trail but away to the right of us, and apparently
anxious to avoid us. This was peculiar, as in a country where days
may pass without seeing a soul by the way, the custom is to seek the
infrequent wayfarer rather than to avoid him, and I began to think of
all I had been told about being followed. The driver, who had seen them
pass, said he was sure they were not police, and Piet, the _voorlooper_
of the telescopic eyes, corroborated this. Again and again we caught
sight of them, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind or on our flank,
but they never came near us, and it soon became pretty clear that we
were being “shepherded.” Once or twice we tried to signal to them by
waving a handkerchief and shouting, but they took no notice, and G.,
exasperated at their attitude, seriously suggested having a shot at
them with the rifle.
CHAPTER VI
ZWARTMODDER--THE MOLOPO--RIETFONTEIN--THE GAME RESERVE.
On the third day we reached Zwartmodder, a tiny police post and store
in the old dry bed of the Molopo, whose course we were now to follow
for some days. The two policemen (C.M.P.) stationed at this lonely
little spot told us the horsemen had gone straight through without
coming near the station, and confirmed us in our suspicion as to what
these sneaks were after. Zwartmodder is a weird and desolate little
place standing in a deep, narrow, rock-walled valley, whose sandy floor
was the bed of the ancient river that once flowed right across what is
now the Kalahari Desert from near Mafeking, westward, and then south,
for many hundreds of miles, till it joined the Orange below the great
falls of Aughrabies. In most places it is sand-choked to the level of
the surrounding desert. In others, though still dry, it is filled with
vegetation, and indeed many stretches farther north are well timbered,
with fine mimosa and other thorn-trees. But, with the exception of one
or two melancholy survivors, there are none of these trees left near
Zwartmodder, the channel being loose sand where it is not the “black
mud” from which the place is named.
Made anxious by this particular “shadowing” by men who kept ahead of
us, I consulted the driver as to whether we could leave the track and
give them the slip, and for the first time showed him the map old
Anderson had made.
Considering the time that had elapsed since it was drawn, we had found
it so far astonishingly accurate. It showed the old traveller’s road
from Griquatown along the northern bank of the Orange to “Klaas Lucas
Kraal,” a native stadt in those days, and now Upington; it gave the
route northward to the Hygap (the Hottentot name for the Molopo) and
Zwartmodder, and thence clearly to Hachschein Vley and the spot we hoped
to find a fortune in. And the driver, after perusing it, told us that,
whatever we might do when we arrived at the vley, we must follow the
present road that far. For eastward stretched the unknown, waterless,
and forbidden wastes of the Game Reserve, and westward, and nearer to
us each day of our trek, was the frontier-line and German territory, to
enter which and trek north would mean endless red tape and obstruction.
So there was no help for it but to keep on as we were going, up the
dry bed of the Molopo. The following day we struck an oasis in the
shape of a clean, comfortable, and well-furnished dwelling, the farm
“Bloemfontein,” whose then owners were an object-lesson to their
benighted neighbours as to what comfort can be obtained by a little
trouble and expense, even here on the fringe of the desert. Here I was
shown some very fine-looking “yellow ground” from an adjoining farm
near the German border which was being worked for diamonds. It looked
extremely promising, and contained plenty of “carbon,” garnets, etc.,
but the other stones shown me in conjunction with it were zircons and
not diamonds, as had been believed. This gentleman also told me of
many strange “pans” in the real desert eastward, where diamonds were
supposed to exist, but in which direction all prospecting and even
trekking was now forbidden, and his experiences so interested me that I
resolved sooner or later to explore those “pans” myself.
At Witkop the following day I had further evidence shown me of the
abundance of diamondiferous “indications” that are such a feature of
Gordonia, for here “yellow ground,” with all its usual inclusions, was
to be seen in close proximity to the road, and indeed there is proof
everywhere in this locality that pipes, fissures, or other occurrences
of Kimberlite exist, and need but a little systematic prospecting to
locate. Whether they are diamondiferous can only be proved by working
them, but the fact that at various times diamonds have been picked
up here and there in the vicinity certainly makes such a supposition
reasonable.
However, we had neither the time nor the right to prospect these places
and pushed steadily on, hearing occasionally from the far-apart farms
or an infrequent wayfarer that our friends the would-be “claim-jumpers”
kept about an hour ahead of us. Meanwhile we were getting deeper and
deeper into the dunes, and frequently these now vied with the biggest
I had ever seen in the sand-belt of German West. These, however, were
different. The sand was redder, and only the crests of them were bare,
the long “valleys” between their regular wave-like lines, and much of
their slopes, being covered with low bushes and tufts of Bushman grass.
They lay right athwart the path, and trekking over them was a most
tedious and slow operation. Their usual slope was about 45 degrees up
to within a short distance of the summit, where the sand, loose, soft,
and unbound by vegetation, was often piled up by the prevailing wind
into an apex that fell away on the leeward side almost perpendicularly.
And after laboriously straining at our light cart up the rise, the oxen
would go floundering down this declivity in a wild scramble, slipping,
falling, and dragging each other and the cart in a jumble of confusion
till they reached firmer footing below. To ride was impossible; indeed
everything on the cart had to be made fast, or it stood a great chance
of being thrown out and lost. In any case, however, we rode but
seldom, ranging out on either side of the path all day with gun and
rifle, hoping for the chance of a shot that seldom came. Game there
was, for we saw spoors in abundance, but unfortunately these do not
fill the pot, and in spite of the solitariness of the region both fur
and feather were extremely wild. _Paauw_, that most magnificent of
bustards, was abundant but almost unapproachable: _klompjes_ of four
or five together rising repeatedly a few dunes ahead of us, but always
well out of gunshot. Indeed, except at the hottest time of the day,
when they, like the steenbok, can occasionally be caught napping in
the shade of a bush, they are seldom obtainable with a gun, stalking
them and shooting them through the head or neck with a rifle, at 200
yards or more, being the sportsman’s only chance. The larger variety,
known as the _gom paauw_, often weighs from 30 to 40 lb., and has been
recorded up to 50 lb. or more. One of the largest I ever saw must have
been well over that, for it stood quite five feet in height, and I took
it to be a young ostrich when, in the grey light of morning, I one day
came silently upon it within 40 or 50 yards. I had a rifle, but never
dreamed of firing at an “ostrich,” and stood staring open-mouthed
when, after a run of a few yards, the huge creature got up and sailed
majestically away.
Most frequent and most annoying among the larger game-birds was the
_korhaan_, whose irritating croaking cackle could be heard on all
sides, and which seemed to take a mischievous delight in disturbing
other game of a less suspicious nature, whenever we were engaged in
attempting a stalk.
Occasionally a flock of wild ostriches would speed across the path
with enormous strides, covering the ground at an incredible speed;
occasionally a tiny steenbok fell to the rifle, and once or twice a
few gemsbok would be seen for a moment floundering over the crest
of a distant dune, or, with heads thrown back and long sabre-like
horns sloped in splendid attitude, would stand and gaze at us for a
moment before bounding away. Big blue hawks with bright red beaks were
plentiful, and I much regretted having one day shot one, for I found
its crop full of snakes and lizards, and farmers have told me that this
same _blaauw valk_ does infinitely more good in this respect than the
much-belauded secretary-bird.
We saw but few snakes, an occasional _geel capel_ (yellow cobra) or a
lazy and bloated puff-adder failing to get out of our way before we
saw him, but scorpions were an absolute pest. They came along with
their tails cocked up, rampant and vicious, and pining for something to
sting, walking straight at the camp fire of an evening, and stinging
at the embers till they sizzled on them, when the cheerful smell that
arose would bring others by the dozen. At least, the natives firmly
believe this, and certainly our experience confirmed it. In gathering
firewood or dry leaves one had to be especially careful of these little
pests, and it was no uncommon thing to find three or four nestling
between our blankets and the sand in the morning. Often we amused
ourselves by catching them and putting two together in a sieve on the
ground, when after a little teasing they would fight furiously till
both were stung to death.
We passed the tiny police post at Abiqwas Pits, where two forlorn camel
police are marooned in a desert of sand-dunes and have to guard (?) a
district as big as an English county and watch about forty miles of
the German frontier. The police force of this long border of ours is
grotesquely inadequate and will be referred to later.
Thence we toiled through extremely heavy dunes, alternating with broad,
flat stretches of hard shale, thickly strewn with stones that made
our progress both difficult and painful. These stony spaces are known
locally as _aars_, a name given to any feature on the surface which
is long compared to its breadth, and the variety of water-worn stones
with which they were strewn was astonishing. Fragments of igneous rock
predominated, and conspicuous amongst them were many rounded fragments
of a peculiar amygdaloid similar to that found near Pniel on the Vaal
River, but by no means identical, the tiny steam-holes being filled
with nodules of agate, chalcedony, and other forms of silica, or
occasionally with a bright green mineral that I could not classify.
Prominent also were numerous lumps of bright scarlet jasper, and the
banded ironstone, usually associated with the diamond in the gravels of
the River Diggings, was also here in abundance.
This débris, however, though it is found spread over hundreds of miles
of country, is usually a very superficial layer thinly strewn over the
shale. Where it came from is difficult to imagine, as few of the rocks
of which it is composed are to be found locally; but evidence seems to
point to its having been brought there by huge floods in the remote
past, and at a period prior to the advent of the enormous accumulation
of sand that now forms the dunes of the desert and covers up the bulk
of the “country rock” of this wide, waterless region.
In the midst of these huge dunes, we one evening met a waggon belonging
to a Boer who had for some time past been farming in German territory
over the border, and as it was near outspan time we camped that night
together. He had twenty-four sturdy oxen yoked to his buck-waggon, on
which were piled his few household belongings and his numerous family.
He had been one of the many “irreconcilables” who, having fought to
the last in the Boer War, had refused to live under British rule, and
had trekked to German West and there taken up land and settled down.
And now, after years of galling and irksome submission to the German
régime of red tape and officialism, he had been exasperated beyond all
endurance by some sample of German “justice,” and was trekking back,
extremely thankful to be once more under the once despised and hated
Union Jack, and full of the wrongs experienced at the hands of the
_Duitsers_.
I met a number of these sadder and wiser men at various times along the
border, and almost invariably their experiences of German rule had had
a most salutary effect upon them, from a British point of view.
Eventually we emerged from these giant dunes on to a fairly wide,
level plain known as Saulstraat, and here by the water-pits found
six fine shady thorn-trees that had been planted in a line by some
thoughtful old pioneer of the desert; and as we had not seen anything
bigger than a bush for some days past, it was most natural that we
should seek their shade for our midday outspan. G. smoothed away a
place from the fallen thorns and threw himself down, whilst I--much
to his surprise--climbed into the cart and prepared to take my siesta
in its very cramped space. “Why don’t you come down here?” asked G. I
told him there might be insects. “Insects!” he said, in high disdain,
“insects! Well, I always thought you were a crank, but that settles it!
Here we’ve been roasting for days till we smell like grilled steak, and
when you get the chance of a bit of comfort in the shade of nice trees,
you’re afraid of insects! Insects! Why, there aren’t any, and if there
were they wouldn’t keep me from this! Insects!”
“Be warned in time,” I said solemnly. “These are no common insects.”
“Oh, shut up,” he snorted; “you and your old yarns! I’m going to
sleep.” And he did; but not for long. By my watch it took just four
and a half minutes before he began to squirm a bit; that meant the
first sam-pan had started prospecting. Soon others evidently put their
pegs in, and in seven and a half minutes the big rush came. I had
always admired, indeed almost reverenced, G.’s ability to sleep at any
time, anywhere, and under any conditions, but the way he withstood the
combined onslaught of that army corps of sam-pans for fully another
three minutes was an eye-opener as to what he could do. At last a
big one at work on his nose must have struck it rich, for G. ceased
his snores and his squirming, and still half asleep struck himself a
violent blow right where the sam-pan was working. He let off a violent
yell, and for the next few minutes his demeanour lacked dignity and
repose. In the middle of his bad language I told him so, also that it
was a pity to forget himself for the sake of a few insects.
“Insects!” he snorted. “You call these blamed calamities insects, do
you? Right-oh, wait a bit, my son--I’ll pay you for this.”
And he did, for the next thing I heard was a splash, and there he was,
clothes and all, in the water-pit--the only water we had, mind, for
drinking purposes for the next twenty-four hours, for our cask and
bags were empty when we arrived and we had not yet refilled them. I
shall never forget those six thorn-trees at Saulstraat, nor the heat
when we left the shade there, for I think that day was the hottest I
experienced during the trip. The heat of the sand struck through our
boot-soles as though we were walking on red-hot embers, whilst the
gait of the poor oxen reminded me of the old saying, “like a cat on
hot bricks.” All round this flat plain between the dunes the mirage
glittered until it was difficult to realise that we were not walking
on the only dry spot in the midst of a wide lake. So perfect was the
illusion that on looking back to the trees we saw them faithfully
mirrored in the placid “water” beneath them, as were the high dunes
and every little prominence in sight. However, after toiling through
another barrier of high dunes we were cheered by the sight of real
water, a fairly wide, shallow vley, with a number of oxen standing in
it, showing where recent rains had fallen at Middle Pits. Here there
was a substantially built house owned by a Bastard farmer, one of the
few remaining original owners of these desert border farms. And here
the sand-dunes came to an end. Ahead stretched flat country broken by
one or two extraordinary black kopjes, the first sign of any intrusive
rock we had seen since leaving Witkop. We had now for the first time an
opportunity of giving our advance agents the slip, and turning abruptly
from the path, we trekked all night, and in the morning were close to
Rietfontein at the north-west corner of Hachschein Vley, and near our
destination.
The vley is such only in name, being a wide expanse of flat country
which has at one time been a shallow lake or marsh, and into which
several small rivers formerly ran. Except after rain these are, of
course, dry, but in the “pan” itself water can be obtained almost
anywhere at a comparatively shallow depth.
In Anderson’s time this had been a noted place for lions, but they do
not come as far south nowadays, and it was in this locality that the
old traveller met with hostile Bushmen. No such place as Rietfontein
then existed, but his map showed a native Kraal called “Quassama,” and
it appeared likely that the post at Rietfontein had been built on the
site of this old Bushman village, which indeed proved to be the case.
If only on account of its remoteness and isolation, this tiny frontier
post of ours merits description. Separated by nearly 150 miles of
sand-dunes from a doctor or a telegraph station, or any of the
conveniences of life even to be found at Upington, and almost double
that distance from the nearest railway at Prieska, it surely vies with
the police posts of the Canadian North-West border for loneliness and
inaccessibility. Its only connecting-link with the Empire it belongs to
is by this wearisome southern route that we had followed, for north of
it there is no other post along the whole 600 miles of British-German
border where the Bechuanaland Protectorate and German South-West march
together to the Caprivi belt and the Portuguese territory of Angola.
East stretches the whole breadth of the Southern Kalahari, pathless,
waterless, and a forbidden land, between them and the Kuruman district,
whilst westward they are bounded by foreign (German) territory.
The nucleus of this forlorn little settlement was the old
mission station belonging to the Rhenish Mission, and dating from the
days of the Bushman kraal old Anderson had seen. It was a substantial
stone-built dwelling, flanked with a chapel and standing by the
all-important water-hole. There was the usual tiny oasis in the
shape of a small garden with a few fig-trees, and half a dozen large
_cameel doorn_ in the sand near showed where the “river” at one time
flowed; but other than this there was no sign of vegetation and the
surroundings were barren and desolate, even for the desert. A small
thatched building that served for Court-house (for Rietfontein is the
seat of a magistracy), as well as residence for the magistrate and
officer in charge of the police, a fairly well stocked store, and the
few miserable hovels that housed the Bastard and Hottentot community
of the mission, and the equally tumble-down quarters of the police
troopers, constituted the whole of the most important police post along
our whole frontier.
[Illustration: A BEAUTIFUL GORGE OF THE ORANGE RIVER (NEAR
“AUSENKEHR”)]
Of course the Rietfontein missionary was a German; moreover, although
he was a J.P. of the district he had never taken the trouble to
learn English, and his flock of coloured ragamuffins were as nearly
Germanised as he had been able to make them. He proved to be the
possessor of a very old map of the locality which gave all the old
native names, and which I covet to this day, and upon which we were
able to verify our idea as to Rietfontein and Quassama being identical.
And cheered by this fresh proof of Anderson’s accuracy, within an hour
of our arrival we again set out on foot, thinking to be able to walk
straight to the “valley of diamonds” we had come so far to find. But
alas! the map--so correct up to now--failed lamentably upon this most
vital point of all, for certain physical features there laid down
were utterly lacking in the direction the chart pointed to, and after
spending the rest of the day in a vain search we came back considerably
discouraged. And day after day the same thing happened. Having failed
to find the spot at once, I obtained the services of one or two of
the older Bastard inhabitants, as also an old Bushman, and under
their guidance I wore out two pairs of strong boots in systematically
searching the locality, putting in eight or ten hours of walking each
day, and only giving up after ten days of this wearisome search, when
I had absolutely convinced myself that no such place existed anywhere
upon the ground I was entitled to prospect, or indeed anywhere within
many miles of the position marked so clearly upon the map. And so we
had come nearly a thousand miles, over three hundred of which had been
by trekking through a desert and difficult country, for nothing, simply
upon another wild-goose chase!
I do not wish to say that no such spot ever existed. In fact, I have
no doubt that Anderson made the discovery much as he described it; but
my opinion is that he did not make the map till many years after his
visit, and that the locality was wrongly marked by many miles.
Yet Kimberlite existed in the vicinity; indeed, a “blank” variety,
containing but few inclusions, was to be seen in many of the dry
watercourses that honeycombed the country, and I found garnets and
ilmenite in one or two places, but none of the other minerals described
and brought back by Anderson and shown me in Cape Town.
The fact having been reluctantly forced upon me that the map was wrong,
I had at length no alternative but to abandon the search, our one
consolation being that the two would-be “claim-jumpers” who had turned
up at a neighbouring farm a day or two after our arrival, and who had
laboriously followed me about the wild country ever since, had also had
their trouble for nothing, besides being considerably mystified into
the bargain. In spite of my failure, I should much have liked to put in
a few months’ systematic prospecting in the locality, for there were
quite sufficient “indications” to warrant it, and such work might well
have led to valuable discoveries.
But I had been instructed simply to verify the existence or otherwise
of the place mentioned in Anderson’s map, and there was nothing for it
but to turn back on our long trek to civilisation.
During the short time we spent at Rietfontein we were most hospitably
entertained by the officer in charge of the few camel police there, and
found that he, in common with his men, was perfectly contented with
the solitary life they were forced to lead. He said that new-comers
sometimes nearly go mad for the first month or two of their lonely and
monotonous existence, but that they almost invariably get so attached
to the place and the life that they seldom apply for a transfer, and
the few who do so are usually anxious to return to the desert within a
very short time. Yet the life is both hard and perilous, for their long
patrols take them many days’ distance into the desert, and often, in
the waterless tracks near the Oup and Nosop “rivers” to the north or
the equally thirst-stricken wastes eastward, they are faced with the
danger of a death from thirst. With a view to minimising the danger of
getting lost in these pathless dunes they usually patrol in couples,
and some of their adventures in tracking down Bushman or Hottentot
cattle-thieves in the heart of the desert would make most excellent
reading.
Most of these chaps pooh-poohed the idea of a mine near their camp.
“Pity you can’t go into the Game Reserve,” they all said; “that’s where
the diamonds are, out towards Tilrey Pan.” But beyond the assertion
and their evident belief, they had no data whatever to confirm what
they said. They had all heard vague rumours as to rich mines existing
there, tales, too, of Bushmen and Hottentots bringing out diamonds
and obtaining cattle and waggons for them; but it was impossible to
trace these stories to their source or confirm them, and beyond a
flying trip or two when water had been too scarce to allow of any
delay, they had seen but little of this forbidden ground themselves. A
few of the nearer “pans” in that region lay within their patrol, and
their description of the rocks and gravels to be seen there excited
my curiosity to an extraordinary degree, whilst they were unanimous
in saying that, from the high dunes they had visited there, numerous
unknown and unvisited pans could be seen dotting the desert eastward.
But this mysterious region, long coveted by prospectors, had for many
years been closed against all prospecting, a tract of country half the
size of England having been proclaimed a Royal Game Reserve, to the
exclusion even of travellers.
The old Bushman who had been my guide knew this district well; in the
past he had hunted ostriches there with the bow and poisoned arrow,
bringing the feathers in to the rare trading waggons to exchange for
tobacco and the like, and he asserted that Bushmen still wandered
there, independent of water and living on the _tsamma_ (or wild melon)
in lieu thereof. “Bright stones,” yes, some of the “pans” were full of
them, and he also had heard that men had obtained many head of oxen and
five waggons for these! But which “pans” they came from he could not
say; there were many, many of such places. Yes, he knew pans where the
soil was _blaauw_ (blue) and crumbled in the hand, and where the _rooi
blink klippers_ (bright red stones--garnets) lay by the shovelful, and
green stones too. Would he be able to take me to these places? Yes! and
to where there was a “fontein” of good water too, but the police would
put him in _tronk_ if he went there; no one was there but _schelm_
Bushmen, cattle thieves.
All of which made me more anxious than ever to explore this forbidden
stretch of country, and on our way back I took every opportunity that
offered to question both natives and farmers as to whether diamonds had
ever been found there, and found that the belief that mines existed
there was universal.
Few of the farmers cared to acknowledge that they had ever been more
than a mile or two into the Reserve (and then always after “strayed
cattle”); but as a matter of fact a great deal of poaching is carried
on by these dwellers on the border, and many a waggon of gemsbok
biltong finds a way to dodge the rare patrols of the few police.
As we again approached the dry bed of the Molopo (which practically
forms the boundary-line between the Reserve and the line of surveyed
farms fringing the German border), I took several opportunities of
penetrating for a few miles into the prohibited area, to where, from a
high dune, it is possible to scan the huge expanse of pathless desert
stretching eastward, whilst from the rocky kopjes that here and there
rise near the ancient river I was once or twice able to overlook it
to even better advantage. And as far as the eye could reach, to where
sand and sky met in the mirage and shimmer of the horizon, there was
nothing but serried lines of enormous dunes, except where, here and
there, flat open spaces, glimmering like lakes with the sheen of the
mirage, showed the position of some of the larger “pans.” Near many of
these, I noted that the sand, reddish or dun-coloured in general, was
snow-white; a feature that also struck me was that the position of each
of these sand-encircled spaces was invariably marked by the proximity
of an exceptionally high dune, towering well above its neighbours. Seen
at sunrise this vast expanse presented a most extraordinary appearance,
the position of each “pan” being marked by a dense low-lying cloud of
mist, which of course dispersed as the sun gained in power. Altogether
it was a most fascinating stretch of country, made doubly so by its
being forbidden ground, and by repute a region of great mineral wealth.
And abundant evidence was forthcoming that these stories of diamonds
in the desert were not without foundation, for in many places along
our more leisurely route homewards we came across carbon, garnets,
oblivine, and all the usual accompaniments of the precious stones,
whilst in more than one instance well-defined “pipes” were pointed out
in which “yellow” and “blue” ground--practically identical with that of
the Premier Mine--was disclosed in dry watercourses; and there can be
no doubt that a very large number of these Kimberlite occurrences await
systematic prospecting.
But as we approached Upington again, the few inhabitants we questioned
no longer referred to the “Game Reserve” as being the whereabouts of
diamonds; instead, they universally spoke of a spot in quite another
direction.
As their tale ran, in substance, an enormously rich mine was discovered
many years ago in the wild tangle of almost unknown mountains known
as the Noup Hills, which lie on the northern bank of the Orange River
below the Great Falls and the Molopo, and which few white men have
ever penetrated. In the early days of Kimberley, a Hottentot had told
his master there that he knew of a place where the diamonds lay thick,
and eventually this digger had undertaken the long trek, and after
incredible hardships had found the spot and made himself a rich man in
an hour or two. But he barely escaped with the diamonds and his life,
and so terrible had been his experiences that nothing would induce him
to return.
The tale, though differing in detail, was always substantially the
same, and whether true or not it is certainly believed in by the bulk
of the inhabitants of the southern part of Gordonia, and indeed I have
since had abundant reason myself for believing that it has a foundation
of fact. Now, some years ago, Brydone, the well-known writer of South
African stories, wrote a most thrilling one around this incident, which
he published under the title of _A Secret of the Orange River_, and
which gives a most accurate description of the little-known region in
question; so accurate, indeed, that the author had certainly either
visited the spot himself or taken the description first-hand from one
who had.
It has been maintained that the story had no foundation of truth and
originated solely in the fertile brain of the writer; but this I can in
no wise credit, for there are men in the district who had heard it long
before Brydone wrote his book, and indeed who had never heard of the
latter.
And in Upington, when we arrived there, an enthusiastic friend of mine
declared that he could produce a man who knew the actual spot, and who
had long expressed a wish to lead a properly equipped expedition to it.
Unfortunately, this man was not to be found at the time of my return;
but even during the few days that I remained in Upington I was able to
gather a lot of data that seemed to confirm the story, and my desire to
visit the Noup Hills now equalled my longing to enter the Game Reserve.
However, nothing could be done till certain guides were forthcoming and
other matters satisfactorily arranged, so, leaving my local friend to
hunt up all the information he could about diamonds in either locality,
I left Upington for Prieska on New Year’s Day, 1910, consoling myself
with the reflection that, though Anderson had led me still another
wild-goose chase, it might not have been absolutely in vain.
CHAPTER VII
KLEIN NAMAQUALAND--RICHTERSFELDT--PORT NOLLOTH AND THE
“C.C.C.”--STEINKOPF--WONDERFUL NAMAQUALAND FLOWERS--TREKKING TO
RICHTERSFELDT--FLEAS!--MONOTONY OF THE COUNTRY--MOUNTAINS IN SIGHT.
Whilst discussing ways and means for investigating the fascinating
regions I have just described, something occurred to set my thoughts
entirely in another direction. This was nothing less than an
opportunity of exploring the lower reaches of the Orange River, and the
miniature Switzerland of untraversed mountains bordering them, known
as the Richtersfeldt Mountains. Over the vast mission-lands in that
region a syndicate had obtained certain rights, and as the country was
reported to be richly mineralised I was sent up to examine it, and thus
given the chance I had so long desired.
For here, as I have already mentioned, Stuurmann, whom we had met at
Luderitzbucht, had seen such wonderful gravels, full of “crystals”
that might well have been diamonds. Apart from its diamondiferous
possibilities, the northern position of Klein Namaqualand immediately
adjoining the Orange River has long enjoyed the reputation of being
very highly mineralised; but owing to difficulty of transport and
various other reasons, its mineral wealth has remained practically
unexploited, and the region only known to the very few.
As far back as 1838 Sir James Edward Alexander, F.R.G.S., published an
account of an _Expedition of Discovery into the Interior of Africa_,
which he had carried out under the auspices of the British Government
and the Royal Geographical Society during the previous year, and during
which he had explored the lands adjoining the southern bank of the
Orange River for some 200 miles from the mouth. He was shown many rich
deposits of copper by the natives, and so struck was he by what he saw
that a year or two later, in London, he formed a company having for
its object the exploitation of this new source of mineral wealth. Sir
James’s scheme included the utilisation of the Orange River during the
flood season for the floating down of ore, in flat-bottomed barges, to
a wharf near the mouth of the river, and thence by waggon transport to
one of the small bays near for shipment oversea; or the alternative of
smelting furnaces near the river, fuel being obtainable from the thick,
luxuriant belt of timber on either bank.
Definite information as to operations carried out some seventy-odd
years ago are hard to obtain, but some attempt was certainly made to
carry out this scheme, ore being actually floated down the river and
shipped from Alexander Bay, Peacock Bay, and Homewood Harbour; all
within a few miles of the Orange River mouth, and at all of which the
ruins of substantial buildings, boatslips, etc., standing deserted
to-day on the lonely shores, bear eloquent testimony of this period of
activity of a bygone day. But the venture was premature. It was before
the days of steam; the ore had to be towed out by ship’s boats; the
prevailing wind, which blows with extraordinary force all along this
coast, must have been a great obstacle to the rapid handling of ore,
and the consequent delay was probably one of the principal reasons for
the abandonment of the scheme.
However, the prospecting carried out had proved many of the deposits to
be extremely rich, and some years later development work was started in
several places by different syndicates, with excellent results, and a
certain amount of ore was again shipped from Alexander Bay; but by this
time a formidable rival had appeared upon the scene in the shape of the
Cape Copper Company, who, with their own line of railway connecting
their own copper-mine at O’okiep with their own port at Port Nolloth,
had already begun to exercise that influence upon the affairs of
Namaqualand that has lasted up to the present day.
Adverse circumstances thus again proving too strong for these budding
copper ventures, the country once more became deserted, the actual
locality of many of the abandoned workings remaining known only to a
few among the Hottentots who form the scanty inhabitants.
It was with a view to locating and examining as many of these mineral
deposits as possible, as well as keeping an eye on the prospects of the
diamonds that Alexander and his followers had never dreamed of, and
also to finding a route between them and the bays near the Orange River
mouth, that I landed at Port Nolloth in August 1910, having made the
voyage in the S.S. _Hellopes_, and having arrived in a thick fog the
very twin brother of the one that hid everything on my previous visit
there. However, by midday the sun had got the best of it, and we were
slung overside in a big basket, dumped into a waiting lighter and towed
ashore.
I was a bit curious to see Port Nolloth, for I had heard a good deal
about it, and the mournful sound of the bell-buoy had engendered a
somewhat mournful anticipation, which I may say fell far short of the
reality.
A long row of low shanties, mostly of corrugated iron, almost level
with and facing the sea, on a narrow path won from the desert of
white powdery sand stretching behind it; not a tree, bush, or sign of
vegetation except the bright hues of the cherished pot plants adorning
the tiny stoeps of some of the dwellings on the “front,” whose owners
doubtless like to remind themselves that there are other things on
earth beside sand and sea and the Cape Copper Company.
[Illustration: GRANITE RANGE BEHIND KUBOOS, RICHTERSFELDT.]
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO A BAD PASS, RICHTERSFELDT.
Ransson in foreground.]
A fog almost every morning, chilly, damp, and all-pervading, mournful
surroundings made more mournful by the incessant tolling of the
bell-buoy rocking on the dangerous bar, the muffled crash of surf
on a sandy shore and the periodical boom of the detonator from the
signal-station. Then, when Father Sol has vanquished mist and fog,
an hour or two of intense heat, and the glare from white sand and
burnished sea and sky sufficient to blind one; this again followed by
the uprising of the prevailing wind, which, if kind, may for a time
make life tolerable, but which usually means a change infinitely for
the worse, a change to sand, whirling and driving in all directions,
penetrating every house, every room, every orifice, choking and
blinding one and making the bathless “hotel” absolutely unendurable.
The daily event the departure of the miniature train carrying coke to
O’okiep for the smelting out of the copper ore, which the return train
brings back in the shape of opulent “regulus” which, in pigs, bars,
trucks, and stacks, lies near the landing-stage in hundreds of tons,
ready for shipment to Europe to help swell the profits of that great
_quasi_ monopoly, the Cape Copper Company.
It is not my province to unduly criticise this important corporation,
from whose officials, moreover, I have always received the greatest
courtesy; at the same time one cannot but deplore the fact that the
many millions profit it has made since its inception some forty years
ago have done so little towards the general development of Namaqualand,
and that their railway-line of nearly 100 miles should have tended so
little to open up the surrounding country. Indeed, but for the wharves,
tugs, and primitive facilities for shipping copper at Port Nolloth, the
mine at O’okiep, and the railway, Namaqualand generally is little the
richer for the “C.C.C.”[1]
[Footnote 1: This was written in 1910, when the mines were in full
swing. To-day they are closed, the C.C.C. having ceased operations in
June 1919. This closing down of the only industry in Namaqualand caused
endless suffering to the wretchedly poor inhabitants, and was followed
by a general exodus of the population.]
In order to obtain the necessary Hottentot guides for the expedition
I had first to proceed to Steinkopf, a tiny mission station some
seventy-odd miles up the C.C.C. line from Port Nolloth, and the
headquarters of the Steinkopf and Richtersfeldt Mission-lands, upon
which most of the copper deposits I wished to locate were situated; and
as soon as I possibly could I finished my business in Port Nolloth and
proceeded thither. Leaving at 8.30 one morning when the combination
of fog, surf, and bell-buoy were more unbearable than usual, the
tiny little engine laboriously hauled its long load of coke-laden
trucks, together with a few antiquated coupé carriages of fearful and
wonderful design and dilapidation, and dignified locally by the name of
“specials,” inland across a monotonous and level belt of sand which,
arid and destitute of vegetation near the coast, becomes eventually
covered with low bush, scanty at first, but after a few miles thick
and luxuriant, and apparently excellent for stock-raising purposes. At
“Five Miles,” where there is the Namaqualand equivalent for a station,
some iron tanks of goodly dimensions show from whence Port Nolloth
draws its supply of fresh water, which is taken in in “water cabins”
by train, and distributed about the town by a primitive system of
water-barrels drawn by mules.
The mountains dimly visible from Port Nolloth are first reached at
Oograbies, where abrupt sandstone kopjes of considerable height extend
north and south from either side of the line. These, however, are but
outliers of the formidable mountain range farther inland, which forms
an abrupt barrier at Anenous, some thirty-five miles farther on. This
place was for many years the terminus of the railway, the copper having
in those days been brought down to it in waggons through difficult
passes in the mountain. Here, as at several other spots along the line,
there is a good supply of water; indeed, it appears that practically
wherever water has been bored for in this so-called “waterless desert”
it has been found at a very moderate depth below the surface.
Thence the mountains rise abruptly, the track ascending by tortuous
curves and gradients far exceeding in steepness those of the famous
Hex River Pass, and climbing some 2,000 feet within the next few
miles. The scenery is magnificent: mountain after mountain on either
side, peak after peak, and range after range; near at hand the vivid
splashes of bright-coloured rocks showing up in brilliant contrast to
the green of the _melk bosch_ (euphorbia) clothing the less precipitous
slopes, everything startlingly clear and distinct in the brilliant
sunshine and clear air of the mountains, the tawny hues of the peaks
in the middle distance gradually changing to a blue, which in the more
remote ranges became ethereal to a degree, till mountain and sky became
merged in the bright shimmer of the horizon. Around Klipfontein are the
corn-lands of the natives, and on the occasion of my first visit these
“lands” presented a most beautiful and wonderful appearance. For field
after field of cleared plateau and mountain slopes were ablaze with
gorgeous colour, being absolutely covered with the most brilliant-hued
flowers, not mingled in blurred and confused masses, but in broad and
clearly defined stretches of different vivid colourings. Here, morgen
after morgen of glorious crimson; there, half a mountain-side of
mustard yellow, in startling contrast to the other half of azure blue.
Parterres of lovely heliotrope, red-hot patches of scarlet and orange
of every shade, of pink, of mauve, salmon, a hundred tints, and all so
thickly clustered and luxuriant, so well-defined and separated, that
the general impression was that of an enormous garden of wonderful
carpet bedding. The veldt flowers of South Africa are justly celebrated
for their wonderful beauty, but I doubt if at any other part of the
sub-continent they can be seen in such gorgeous perfection as at
Klipfontein on the Port Nolloth-O’okiep line.
The season for them is, however, but a transient one, and two months
later, when I again passed the spot, not a blossom was to be seen.
A few miles farther and Steinkopf is reached; from thence the track
winds on a down-grade across a wide, barren, desolate plain, broken by
queer-looking granite kopje, to where a high, humped mountain marks
the position of the copper-mine at O’okiep.
Steinkopf consists of a mission church and buildings substantially
built of stone by the natives themselves, a post and telegraph office,
a store or two, and a scattered collection of miserable shanties and
the circular mat huts of the natives. Flimsy as these latter are, they
are infinitely preferable to the paraffin-tin built abominations usual
to the locations, for they are not only more sightly, but they can
easily be moved when sickness or a prolonged stay upon one spot has
produced the usual awful state of sanitary affairs.
The Hottentots are miserably poor; they depend upon a few poor flocks
and herds for a living, together with a precarious harvest which want
of rain cheats them of. Year after year their scanty corn-lands on the
slopes of the mountain, where rain is most likely to fall, have been
ploughed and sown, and a promising crop has again and again sprung up,
only to wither and die for want of rain long before reaching maturity.
This had happened time after time at the period when I first visited
the place, until no corn remained for the people to sow, the seed
having been eaten to keep them from starving. There was no work in
the district, the supply being greatly in excess of the only demand,
namely that of the C.C.C., and present conditions rendering it almost
impossible for “outside” mining ventures to work the many known mineral
deposits in the vicinity at a profit.
The rain had evidently been widespread, and its fall relieved me of
the anxiety I had felt about the scarcity of water on my coming trip,
for which I was now able to make final arrangements. My visit had been
timed to coincide with the missionary’s periodical trip to the remote
mission station of Kuboos, in Richtersfeldt, where once a year the
nomad Hottentots forming that community gather for _nachtmaal_, and
this would be the most favourable opportunity for meeting the guides
I needed. All being arranged, I returned to Port Nolloth, where I met
S. Ransson, my companion for the trip, a tough and seasoned prospector
whose recent two years on the diamond-fields of German South-West had
turned him into a sort of salamander, with a hide like biltong, and
a positive liking for a diet largely consisting of sand and “brak”
water. With him came the whole cargo of stores necessary for such a
long trip, for we had been warned that the country we were going into
was practically a land of famine. The few inhabitants--Hottentots and
Bastards of the Richtersfeldt Mission-lands--are wretchedly poor,
practically existing upon the milk of their few cows and goats; they
very rarely slaughter an animal, and are very reluctant even to sell
one; they grow nothing whatsoever except a few patches of corn on the
mountain-tops near Kuboos, the harvest of which, when they are lucky
enough to reap one, is only sufficient to last them a few months; and
when milk fails and grain is finished they exist upon a few edible
roots and the gum of the thorn-trees growing on the banks of the Orange
River. And as we expected to employ a fair number of these natives,
and would have to feed them, it came about that, roomy as the waggon
proved, its capacity was taxed to the utmost, and its team of sixteen
sturdy oxen had plenty of collar-work before they got through the belt
of heavy sand that stretches for miles inland from the sea.
The team, with its Hottentot driver and _voorlooper_, had come three
days’ long trek from Kuboos to Port Nolloth to fetch us, and to our
dismay we learnt from them the grave fact that, contrary to our
expectation, the heavy rains that had recently fallen in the Steinkopf
district had not extended to Richtersfeldt, whither we were bound, that
the water-holes were dry, and that the oxen had not tasted water during
the three days of intense heat that the journey had lasted. Not that
they appeared inconvenienced; indeed, these Namaqualand cattle run the
camel close in their ability to go for long periods without water, and
their nomad owners are thus able to “run” them over tracts of veldt
far distant from the precious fluid, caring little so long as they can
get them to water every third or fourth day. To a minor degree this
faculty is also shared by the few ponies bred in the country and called
locally _boschje kops_, wiry little animals with a good deal of Basuto
blood in them, and perfect marvels for endurance. I have on more than
one occasion ridden one of these ponies three days without being able
to give it a drop of water, and have seen it, when grass failed, and
every bush was burnt dry with the awful sun, contentedly chewing the
sapless twigs from the bushes that an ordinary goat would disdain, or
apparently thriving upon the dry fallen leaves beneath the trees in the
scorched-up river-beds.
The waggon track to Richtersfeldt leads north-east from Port Nolloth,
and after a few hours’ trek the sand veldt becomes thickly bushed,
_melk bosch_, _zout bosch_, and many other fleshy-leaved aromatic and
resinous shrubs densely covering the long, undulating slopes of heavy
sand, the sad monotony of dark grey-green being unbroken except by an
occasional lily-like flower of a brilliant scarlet; no sign of life
anywhere, the silence unbroken except for the crack of the whip or the
yell of the driver, the sand effectually deadening the sound of the
wheels and the tread of the oxen. As we wished to see the whole of
the country we were travelling through, we trekked only by day, quite
contrary to the general custom of the country in the hot season; and as
the intense heat made it impossible to move during a considerable part
of the day, our progress was of necessity slow. The country was quite
uninhabited and we saw not a soul during the first day; but towards
evening we were overtaken by some five or six Hottentot women with a
perfect mob of children, who, it appeared, were also bound for Kuboos.
[Illustration: FEEDING THE HUNGRY AT THE STEINKOPF NATIVE MISSION
STATION, LITTLE NAMAQUALAND.]
[Illustration: HARD PULLING IN THE HALGHAT RIVER KLEIN, NAMAQUALAND.]
They were frowsy and filthy and poverty-stricken to a degree, and in
a weak moment, having pity on one poor old bundle of rags who was
carrying a baby and seemed hardly able to get along, I motioned her
to get up on the waggon box, and later, when two or three pot-bellied
little imps clambered up beside her, I hadn’t the heart to turn them
off. Then--it being late afternoon of a terrifically hot day, and the
waggon going smoothly through the soft sand--I stretched out and fell
asleep for a bit.
My dreams were interrupted by a terrific blow on the nose, and I
awoke with a yell to find a small but extremely odoriferous youngster
sprawling across my face, having fallen from a perch which he had
evidently taken up on our piled-up belongings behind us; each box
or bag or sieve was occupied by others: one of them had on my new
pith helmet and nothing else--the whole waggon, in fact, was filled
and festooned and overflowing with them. On the box-seat now sat
four frowsy old hags smoking, spitting, and clucking like a barnyard
full of hens, whilst the atmosphere...! A sudden jolt of the waggon
threw another youngster across Ransson’s _embonpoint_--much to my
gratification--but he merely snored a bit louder. I, however, felt
myself quite unequal to the occasion or the odour, and scrambling out
of the waggon, I gave them best and walked. We outspanned in the middle
of the track, the native drivers on these lonely treks seldom troubling
to draw aside from the beaten path. Glorious are these Namaqualand
nights, the soft, velvety blackness of the seemingly limitless veldt,
above the great solemn blinking stars, looking double the size they
appear through the denser atmosphere of the South, and making one feel
very small and wormlike.
There is an abundance of fuel in the shape of dry bush almost
everywhere in Namaqualand, and that first night of our trek our fire
blazed brightly nearly the whole night, the natives huddling near it
and clucking and cackling in their extraordinary “click” language,
men, women, and quite small children passing from mouth to mouth the
native-made soapstone pipes, filled with their loved _tabaki_. These
pipes are peculiarly shaped, being a straight tube like a very large
cigar-holder, and often the more primitive natives simply use the
hollow shin-bone of buck or sheep.
We slept in the waggon, or rather tried to, and as we turned in
Ransson commented on the extraordinary monotony and lifelessness of
the country so far. “No life,” said he, “no game, nothing to shoot
at, neither buck nor bird, no snakes, no insects even!” He was still
grumbling when I fell asleep--but he was wrong! I have a sleeping-bag,
and usually, when I am once inside it, it needs a cyclone to wake me
before daybreak; but that night the paucity of insect life in the
surrounding country was accounted for by the fact that they had all got
inside my bed, and appeared, moreover, to resent my presence. For a few
minutes I dreamed that I was being used as a garden roller over a bed
of stinging-nettles, then I woke to find myself squirming and writhing
in an absolute bagful of fleas; not the decent educated variety, mind,
but Namaqualand fleas, belonging to a land of famine and bent on making
up for it while the chance lasted. I was out of that bag in quick time,
but the whole waggon was phosphorescent with fleas, and through it all
the other chap snored. He afterwards said that I was the best man he’d
ever been out with; whilst I was around every flea in the vicinity left
their homes to follow me, and he could sleep in peace, but personally I
think they knew what they were up to when they left him alone....
I finished the night outside, my only idea in sleeping in the waggon
having been to avoid the dew, which on the coast-belt is often
extremely heavy, and which accounts for the dense belt of low bush. A
tramp through it in the early morning on the lookout for a shot means
being saturated, every bush and plant being soaked with brilliant
dew-drops. Doubtless this helps the animals that feed there to exist
so long without water, sheep in particular; indeed, I have been assured
that in certain parts of the veldt thereabouts lambs often go for the
first six months of their lives without ever seeing water, and have no
notion as to how to drink it when first brought to a pool.
The end of the second day’s wearisome trek brought us to Daberass,
where, in a wild, rocky ravine amongst rugged kopjes, we hoped to find
water for the oxen; but the deep hole scooped in the sand was scarcely
damp at the bottom, and we thanked our lucky stars that our own
water-barrels were holding out well.
The hills bordering the ravine (which is the dry bed of the Halghat
River) were soon passed, and another wide expanse of bush-covered plain
came in sight, on the far side of which, as far as the eye could reach,
extended a range of bold and fantastic peaks.
There was no sign of the herds of springbok which are at times found on
Richtersfeldt, a few _paauw_--very wild and quite unapproachable--being
the only signs of life; there was nothing to prospect but sand, or an
occasional outcrop of white, barren and “hungry”-looking quartz, barely
worth turning aside to look at; and I sat on the waggon box and looked
at that distant line of blue peaks and wanted those mountains bad! That
was before I got to them, mind....
CHAPTER VIII
RICHTERSFELDT--ALEXANDER BAY--MOUTH OF THE ORANGE RIVER--“HADJE
AIBEEP”--HELL’S KLOOF--A DESERTED COPPER-MINE--ROUGH GOING--A
MAGNIFICENT VISTA OF PEAKS--AN OLD GOLD PROSPECT.
The fourth day found us at Springklip, a solitary hill near the
mountain range, where, between two outlying granite peaks, a few
waggons, and here and there a mat hut, marked the spot on which the
Hottentots were to assemble for their annual _nachtmaal_ (communion).
There was no sign of a permanent settlement; indeed, with the exception
of Kuboos, a day’s trek farther on, where there is a tiny stone-built
mission church, these nomads have no fixed village, trekking from place
to place as water and grazing dictate.
During the whole of our four days’ slow trekking we had not seen a
solitary human being, but now the natives could be seen coming in from
all directions: parties of two or three men mounted on wiry little
ponies, and followed by their women and children on foot; others
mounted on powerful-looking riding oxen, saddled with horse-saddles of
obviously German make, and significant of the loot brought from the
farther side of the Orange River by the many refugees who had followed
those doughty Hottentot fighters, Witbooi and Marengo, in the Hottentot
rebellion; rickety waggons and weird-looking carts tied together
with bits of riem and kept together by a miracle; others driving
ponies laden with bloated and repellent-looking water-skins from the
nearest water-hole at Doornpoort, some ten miles farther on among the
mountains, to which spot our poor oxen had to be driven before they
could quench their four days’ thirst. The natives soon came flocking
round our waggon. They seemed a dejected, harmless, invertebrate lot
of beings, with very little character except an inveterate habit of
cadging. Tobacco was their great desideratum, but it was noteworthy
that, greedy as they were for it, they invariably shared anything given
to them. They were all cleanly-looking, and though their clothing was
in many cases a miracle of patchwork, no rags were to be seen.
Mr. Kling, the missionary, arrived that night, and the following
morning Ransson and I set out to visit his waggon, about half a mile
from our own. Although waggons, carts, and huts had considerably
increased in numbers since our arrival, not a soul was to be seen, and
the missionary’s waggon was likewise deserted; but from a huge erection
of fresh bushes that I took to be a sort of cattle kraal I could hear
voices. There appeared to be only two people speaking; first would come
a brief emphatic sentence in Dutch, then a reply in clicking Hottentot.
To my limited intelligence it sounded as though Mr. Kling was sharply
interrogating a native on some point, but, on strolling round the
large and high enclosure to look for an entrance, we came suddenly
upon line after line of kneeling Hottentots, silently and attentively
listening. The “kraal,” in fact, was a temporary chapel hastily built
of bushes and filled to overflowing with devout natives, men on one
side and women on the other, whilst at the far end, by an extempore
altar, stood the missionary and a native in clerical attire, who was
rapidly translating Mr. Kling’s address into the vernacular, sentence
by sentence, and apparently with force and effect.
I’ll own we tried to bolt, but Mr. Kling called us, and we had perforce
to walk up and sit by his side in our shirt-sleeves, facing four or
five hundred pairs of curious eyes.
White men are a rarity in the Richtersfeldt, but surely not
sufficiently so to account for the intense fixity with which these
people regarded me?
Ransson, whom I consider much more of a natural curiosity than I am
myself, they appeared to ignore; every pair of eyes seemed to be
riveted on me! For a moment I felt flattered, then I tumbled! They had
never seen a _bald_ white man before. Ransson told me afterwards that a
ray of sunlight, filtering through the bush roof, struck right on the
top of my cranium, and was reflected as though from a mirror; he also
said they probably thought it was a halo I was wearing. But as he also
spread the quite unfounded yarn as to his having found a hen ostrich
sitting on my head one morning when we were sleeping in the desert, and
evidently taking it for a long-lost egg, I think his statement can be
ignored.
Meanwhile, the sonorous sentences went on, then came hymns sung
with enormous fervour in the extraordinary “click,” prayers and
exhortations, whilst the birds fluttered in the bush roof above us, and
the sun, now high in the heavens, flung broad blotches of gold through
the open spaces on to the motley assembly facing us. And motley it
was to a degree: tall, thin, spare yellow men with rudimentary noses,
high cheek-bones, oblique eyes, and the Tartar appearance of the true
Hottentot, sardonic-looking Bastards with aquiline noses and faces
of a pronounced Jewish type, here a blubber-lipped, grinning Christy
Minstrel, black as ebony, and all rolling eyeballs and gleaming teeth;
there a big nondescript with red hair and a skin all piebald with huge
freckles; by his side, and equally devout, the puckered physiognomy,
all tattoo marks and wrinkles, of a pigmy Bushman.
This extraordinary race-mixture to be found amongst the so-called
“Hottentots” of Richtersfeldt is to be accounted for by the fact
that the lower reaches of the Orange River bordering their territory
was at one time, and to a minor degree is still to-day, a sanctuary
for refugees from every tribe in South Africa. Flying from justice
or persecution, they sought this remote spot, intermarried with
the Hottentots, and have helped produce a tribe, or community, as
heterogeneous as it is possible to conceive.
The following day Mr. Kling sorted out from among his motley flock
the guides who were to take us to the many old prospects among the
mountains, and after consideration we decided to send these men with
the waggon and our heavy stores to Annisfontein, a spot affording the
best starting-place from which to penetrate the tangle of mountains.
Meanwhile, with a light cart drawn by six oxen, we proposed to visit
the little-known bays on the coast near the mouth of the Orange River,
thence working our way up the river-bank till we rejoined the waggon;
and as the pace of the latter with its heavy load would be of necessity
slow, we hoped by this arrangement to save a lot of time.
We started that night. Meanwhile the Hottentot encampment had broken up
and the natives had dispersed in all directions, leaving the empty and
deserted bush chapel alone marking the spot of their meeting-place.
The cart was a featherweight to the sturdy team, and trekking well
into the night and again before dawn, we were in sight of the sea when
the fog lifted in the morning; however, it was still far distant, and
it was then possible to realise to what a height above sea-level the
gently undulating plain had brought us. All day long, with but brief
spells of rest, we trekked on, and the long glistening line of sea
seemed as far off as ever. Two strangely shaped mountains, known as
the “Buchu Bergen,” were our objective, as we knew them to mark the
locality of the bays. That night we again trekked late, and midnight
found us under the black shadow of “Buchu Berg,” with the thunder of
the surf in our ears and the sweet perfume of the _buchu_ bush making
fragrant the cold night air. And cold it was--one of the coldest nights
I ever remember. We had a bucksail with us, but the wind was so strong
that we spent most of the night trying to hold it down over the cart
we were “sleeping” under, and I was very glad when morning came.
Directly below the steep face of Buchu Mountain we came upon the most
perfect little boat bay imaginable, surrounded by high rocks and almost
circular, but with room only for a few lighters and small craft; here
the ruins of a substantial stone house still stand, and little piles of
copper ore scattered here and there tell their tale of the past. South
of the cove runs a long, shallow depression known as Homewood Harbour,
little better, however, than an open roadstead. The whole coast is
indescribably lonely and desolate, and, to add to its dreariness,
scattered along the beach far above high-water mark lie piles of
driftwood, the accumulation of centuries, tree-trunk piled upon
tree-trunk to a height of 4 or 5 feet, and a belt of 10 to 15 yards
extending for many miles. Many of them are the remains of big trunks 2
or 3 feet in diameter, and all of them are bone-dry and like tinder.
Turning northward, we tramped, hot and thirsty, around the long
crescent-shaped indentation known as “Peacock Roadstead,” the northern
extremity of which is Cape Voltas, so named by hardy old Bartholomew
Diaz, who landed there in 1486 and erected a _padrão_--a stone pillar
surmounted by a cross such as these devout old adventurers usually
hanked round with them, tokens of a pledge to the Pope that the
salvation of the infidel was the principal object of their quest.
The headland is low and insignificant, and, as at Cape Cross, no
vestige of the pillar remains, not even the hole it stood in. It is
highly probable that Diaz landed at a small cove some distance from the
point, where there are more ruins of a much more recent date, with a
rude boatslip and many fragments of copper ore.
Following a coastline is tedious work, especially when one is extremely
thirsty and when one feels compelled to examine the gravel for possible
diamonds every few yards; and it was sunset when we reached Alexander
Bay, a nice little harbour with a good beach, sheltered by high rocks
on either side, the entrance partly protected by a bar, and apparently
easily convertible into a very snug little anchorage for the tugs,
lighters and small craft necessary for the shipment of ore on a large
scale. The numerous shell middens to be found on this uninhabited
coast probably mark the site of Bushman or Strandlooper settlements
of long ago, and it is likely that where these huge mounds of shells,
fragments of pottery, etc., are to be found, water was at one time not
far distant, though to-day there is not a drop to be found between the
Orange River and the _brak_ water-holes at Rietfontein, some twenty
miles south.
Just beyond Alexander Bay we found our cart, the oxen outspanned and
the natives as anxious for mutton and coffee as we were ourselves, and
two hours’ trekking with a bitterly cold wind in our teeth brought us
to the ruined farm near the mouth of the Orange, where we were thankful
indeed to get a drink again.
The mouth of the Orange River is simply a wide expanse of mud flats,
interspersed with low islands, and here and there long, lagoon-like
stretches of water. Most of these latter are stagnant and isolated,
and it is only after tedious wading knee-deep in mud and water that a
channel is reached which still moves almost imperceptibly towards the
long sand-bar closing the actual mouth from bank to bank, and through
(or under) which the river, in the dry season, percolates into the sea.
Upon this bar the white Atlantic rollers were breaking, at high tide
sending the salt water surging up the river several miles.
There was wild fowl in abundance. The mud flats were dotted with
flamingoes standing in lines and companies and looking absurdly like
soldiers; wild duck quacked till the whole place sounded like a huge
poultry farm, and the “honk-honk” of beautifully plumaged wild geese
made me regret that, with a laudable anxiety to do nothing unlawful,
I had read up the list of protected game before starting and knew I
must not shoot them. Luckily, however, Ransson had not read that list.
Apart from the wild fowl the spot is absolutely uninhabited, though I
believe the German bank was at that time frequently patrolled. About
two miles from the mouth stands an old ruined farm, with a stone-built
kraal, whose walls of enormous thickness and great height speak
eloquently of the turbulent times, less than seventy years back, when
these lower reaches of the Orange were infested with native outlaws,
who from their fastnesses on the many islands used to sally forth to
pillage and ravage the neighbouring tribes in good old Border fashion.
Both pillagers and pillaged have long since vanished--unless, indeed,
my mutton-loving rascals from Kuboos were lineal descendants of those
bolder robbers of the old days.
A few miles farther upstream we noticed a large number of horses
running on the low islands and the river-bank; they were fine-looking
animals, and appeared to be quite wild and untended. I afterwards found
that they belonged to a Boer farmer living at a solitary farm called
“Groot Derm” some distance from the river mouth, and who breeds them
extensively, finding a ready sale for them among the Germans on the
other side of the river.