The troop, we found, had taken courage of the less imposing scenery,
and were just visible in a cloud of dust some half a mile ahead of
us. Just outside Kolmanskuppe the railway line takes a sharp bend to
the left, and as half a mile in the rear does not exactly correspond
with the M.I. hand-book's definition of an advance guard's position,
we kicked up our tired animals and made a desperate effort, by cutting
across the angle of the line, to regain some measure of dignity.
What the troop thought when, some ten minutes later, we reappeared
in advance of them, I do not know. They looked rather indifferent,
I thought, and when, soon afterwards, a ragged fringe of infantry
appeared on the sky-line above us--Kolmanskuppe is on the edge of the
desert proper, and looks as if it had been washed up by the sea of
mountainous sand-dunes--and the troop, realizing apparently that there
was really no need to follow its meticulous course along the railway
metals, wheeled sharply to the right, we cantered down and, with all
humility, tied ourselves on to its tail.
In the number of its houses, Kolmanskuppe is not a large place; in the
extent covered by such buildings as there are it is quite considerable.
An average distance of about one hundred yards between the houses, and
the glaring monotony of their design stifles any desire on the part of
the visitor unduly to prolong his tour of inspection.
In the ordinary sense we were not, of course, visitors, and besides, we
had "done" Kolmanskuppe, more thoroughly than an American tourist does
Rome, on a previous occasion. Then, we had been actuated by other than
guide-book motives, and now, its interest gone, the place was become an
eyesore, and we wanted to go home. That, we supposed, was why we got
the order to off-saddle.
The one picturesque touch in the picture was supplied by our three
camels. They were there on some water-carrying pretext, and they
recognized us from afar off, and came and stood to windward of us so
that there could be no remote possibility of our not recognizing them.
We never seemed, somehow, to be able to get away from those three gaunt
beasts. No matter the direction of our journeyings, we always met them
sooner or later. We should not, of course, have minded if they had
shown any signs of awakening affection for us, but they didn't. It
was their sneering indifference to our presence that galled us most,
I think. Had we been in the habit of thrusting ourselves upon them,
this attitude would have been understandable, even commendable; but
we didn't thrust ourselves upon them. They hatched deliberate plots
to meet us in unexpected places, and when we met they sneered at us,
and besides, as I have said elsewhere, they smelt abominably. In very
truth, Tartarin of Tarascon was not more haunted by his own camel than
were we by our three.
The corporal who was in charge of them slouched to us from somewhere
out of the desert--he was borrowing habits right and left from his
camels, we often told him--and gave us the cheerful information that
we were to convoy some wagons back to Luderitzbucht, which wagons, he
added, were only then being off-loaded. Dusk was spreading like a gray
blanket across the face of the sands, and the prospect of a night ride
at the tail of a string of creaking wagons was not enticing. We asked
him how he knew, and he retired into his newly acquired camelism, and
went off to his uncouth beasts.
But he was right, and an hour later saw us--or heard us rather,
for it was pitch dark--starting on such a ride as I hope never
again to suffer. The road from Kolmanskuppe to Luderitzbucht is
rendered distinct from the country through which it runs by means of
white-painted paraffin tins placed at irregular intervals along its
alleged sides. That it does not otherwise differ to any marked extent
from the surrounding country is due less, I think, to the surveyor
than to the country, which is mainly precipices and small but very
knobby hills. I have since traveled that road in the daytime, and its
unrelieved roughness--unless an occasional wallow in deep sand can
be called relief--makes of it a thing to be remembered; but of that
night, when our nostrils, and our throats, and our eyes were filled
with the dust kicked up by close upon a hundred mules and half as many
horses, and our ears were deafened by the harsh thunder of empty wagons
bouncing into and out of deep holes and over fire-spitting granite
boulders, recollection is a mere headache.
For the first half-mile or so--my section had now become the
rearguard--we rode at some fifty yards behind the last wagon. We did
this for several reasons: firstly, because the air was less full of
dust at that distance; secondly, because we could more or less select
our own pace instead of having, every now and then, to pull our horses
back upon their haunches to avoid spitting them on the brake handle of
a wagon stopped suddenly in its drunken career by virtue of collision
with some more than usually imposing obstruction; and thirdly--but this
I do not think was a real reason--because we had been ordered to do so.