CHAPTER III
THE NAMIEB DESERT, “SAM-PANS”—CAPE CROSS—SWAKOPMUND—WINDHUK.
Meanwhile a local acquaintance of Jim’s asked Du Toit and me to go with him a day’s journey up the Khuisiep River, to a place in the Namieb Desert, where he believed that tin existed, and I jumped at the opportunity. We had good horses and travelled light, with a few roster-kooks and some biltong by way of provisions, and a water-bottle each. Riding south from the forlorn-looking settlement, we followed the thin line of vegetation denoting the river-bed, which, when it contains water, empties itself into the lagoon terminating the southern extremity of the bay. Thence, striking inland, the bed widens till it becomes a long stretch of wooded country offering the most striking contrast to the barren desert and sandhills that hem it in on either side. But, in spite of the thick verdure and fine trees, there is no water to be met with along the whole route, except immediately after rains, and at one or two spots where pits have been sunk.
What a treat those trees were, though! The eye, aching with the red-hot glare of a whole landscape of bare, scorching sand, turned to their beautiful greenery with a wonderful sense of rest and relief.
Most of them were varieties of acacia,cameel doorn, such as I have described, and others covered with huge, bean-like pods, and most striking among them were fine, majestic trees resembling big oaks in outline, and giving the whole well-wooded expanse a beautiful park-like aspect.
There was plenty of welcome shade, especially from a smaller but thicker-leaved tree of a varietyof wattle; grass and creeping plants made a verdant carpet, butterflies flitted about among brilliant flowers, and bright-plumaged birds called to each other in the trees. In fact, to us, fresh from sand and sea and “sleeping-sickness,” it was Paradise. And I said so to Du Toit as we off-saddled for a bite at midday, knee-haltering our ponies and taking our snack under the shade of a big mimosa. I said to him, “Let’s stop here! Anyway, if we find diamonds or tin, let’s stop here! What can we want more? Green trees, birds, flowers, grass, shade for the seeking, water for the digging! This is Paradise, and it’s good enough for me. I’m going to sleep.”
And I did, Du Toit, with unwonted consideration, offering to keep an eye on the horses, and wake me when it was time to trek again. But I did not sleep long. I awoke with the pleasant sensation of being stabbed all over with red-hot needles. One eye was too swollen to work, but the other advised me of the fact that it was not needles that were troubling me, but a small yet most iniquitous insect that had sampled me before in other sandy parts, but that, in my delight at the beautiful trees and beautiful shade, I had forgotten. This was the “sam-pan.” I had seen him before, but this time I had evidently found him at home, where he lived! He was all over me—a small, pernicious infliction ranging in size from a pin’s head to a shirt-button, flat, almost circular in shape, and with legs all around his perimeter. Entomology is not my strong point, but that’s how he looks, and he feels as though he had a mouth on each foot. And in this case he had caught me just as he might have caught the most abject greenhorn: lying asleep in the shade of a tree where there were obvious signs that cattle, or big buck, had been in the habit of standing.
These horrible little pests are one of the biggest scourges of the desert. They are a species of tick that breed in the droppings of animals, and burrow in the sand of the immediate vicinity, lying low till some juicy, full-blooded victim comes along forthem to perform upon. For this reason they are always plentiful under certain shady trees, favoured by oxen and big game as a resting-place in the heat of the day. Choose one of these spots and sit down in the pleasant shade and watch the sand around you. Not a sign of insect life for the first few minutes—and then! A tiny eruption in the sand near your elbow, and there, scratching his way to daylight—and you—comes the pioneer, followed by others till the whole earth is alive with them. And bite! So poisonous are they to some people that to be bitten badly leads to blood-poisoning, and in any case the intolerable itching from their bites spoils a man for sleep or anything else but scratching and inventing new profanity for days and days after he has been victimised. All of which I had known, and still Du Toit and his companion in crime had caught me beautifully, with the enticing shade of that big tree. They lay sleeping peacefully, a bare twenty yards away, under a bush thick enough to shade them and too small to have harboured oxen—or sam-pans.
We followed the Khuisiep till late that evening, when we came to a water-hole where our horses drank, and near which we slept that night, not too near, for the immediate vicinity was literally buzzing with mosquitoes. The stagnant water was also full of their larvæ—so full that we strained it through a handkerchief before boiling a billy of it for coffee, and got a spoonful of larvæ to each billy. Still it was quite drinkable as coffee, much better than the oleaginous liquid Jim provided us with.
The following morning we left the Khuisiep and turned up a tributary watercourse (dry) coming from the desert eastward; a few miles up which we left the sand behind and came into rocky, broken country, sterile and quite without vegetation. Here there were many outcrops of granite, and in certain parts of the dry stream-bed garnets were lying by the bucketful. They were a constituent of the granite, but in many instances had been mistaken for ruby tin. Black titaniferous iron-sand also abounded inthis stream-bed, and in many of the small quartz reefs large crystals of jet-black tourmaline were to be seen—some of them huge specimens as thick as one’s wrist. Unfortunately, real prospecting was out of the question, as we had neither tins nor tools; but the country is a most interesting one, and it is quite possible that some day a valuable discovery of tin may be made there. Want of water—that great handicap to prospecting in South Africa—prevented us even “panning” the river-bed; but certain sand and gravel, which I took back to the nearest water that night and panned there, yielded both tin and copper, and a fine “tail” of gold. This spot was just over the border of British territory, but the unnamed river apparently came from the mountains, plainly visible in German territory eastward. Our trip back was uneventful, and we arrived at Walfish Bay the following evening, where we solved the water question and found Jim ready to start. Before doing so I indulged in the extravagance of purchasing a small cask for water for my own use; a procedure that called forth such an amount of elaborate sarcasm from Jim and Co. that I soon regretted it, more so as I found on broaching it that the contents tasted as strongly of tar as the other had done of oil.
Again the cutter had favourable winds, and this time neither Du Toit nor myself was seasick, a fact Jim commented upon most ungraciously, as he said we took up less room and were far less in the way when suffering from “sleeping-sickness” than we were doing now we thought we were sailors. There’s no pleasing some people!
We landed at a spot some seventy miles up the coast, and not far distant from Cape Cross, where Diego Cam, one of John of Portugal’s intrepid old navigators, placed apadrâo, or stone cross, when he first landed there in 1460 or thereabouts. This cross, from which the Cape takes its name, has long since disappeared, but according to Jim the sculptured socket in which it was set can still be seen ona prominent point of the rock. Probably it was the only part of the monument that the early souvenir-hunters could not take away with them.
However, much as I wished to see it, we did not get to Cape Cross that journey. We landed in a little cave within a short walk of the beach we were in search of, a beach identical with that one we had prospected lower down the coast, and which yielded identical results. We searched it for a week and found no diamonds.
Moreover we wandered inland, for the interior here, though barren and inhospitable, did not present the difficulties of the huge sand-dunes we had encountered lower down. Flat sandy wastes there were, devoid of vegetation, but easily traversed, and these were also broken by frequent barren kopjes, whilst but a few miles inland we saw high, flat-topped mountains. In many of the dry watercourses and on certain spots on the sand-flats we found likely-looking gravel, but never any diamonds, and at the end of ten days we decided to return to Swakopmund, from whence we could pick up a steamer to Luderitzbucht. Jim suggested this course to us, whilst offering, if we so wished, to carry out his original offer to land us there himself. “But,” said he, “if you’re not keen on it, I’ll just drop you at Swakopmund, where you’ll get a boat easier than you would at Walfish Bay. We’ve got something else on up here that might be worth our while—if you really are not keen!” We quite fell in with Jim’s view, for we neither of us relished beating back against headwinds all the way to Luderitzbucht in the cutter; besides, Jim had proved himself a white man right through, and we didn’t want to stand in the way of that mysterious “something else” he had on. We never asked him what it was, but some funny things could be told about those sealing cutters’ doings along the coast in those days—when none of them were particularly keen about the German Customs regulations! Well, good luckto Jim and his “crew” anyway—they were good sorts!
So they landed us at Swakopmund, and before leaving again Jim told us that he expected to be back in Luderitzbucht in about a month, and, if we were still there and cared to do it, he would take us down to a place not far north of the Orange River mouth where he had heard diamonds had been picked up.
But our late experience had shaken our faith in promising-looking gravel patches, and so we omitted to follow up this clue, which, as events proved later, might very probably have led us to discover the famous and fabulously rich Pomona fields. So, with a vague promise to meet again somewhere, we parted from Jim, who cleared away up the coast—ostensibly at least—on his mysterious errand, and whom I never saw again.
The officials at Swakopmund were both surly and suspicious, but luckily our papers were in order, and we could show sufficient funds to satisfy the immigration authorities; and as we found we should have to wait ten days for a steamer, we decided to run up to the capital, Windhuk, after first having a good look round Swakopmund and the immediate vicinity. Disappointed in their efforts to obtain the country’s natural port at Walfish Bay, the Germans had done their best to construct a harbour at Swakopmund, which is really the mouth of the Swakop, or more correctly “Tsoachaub” river. This river, in common with all others of this country, only flows during the summer months, but water can be obtained in abundance almost all along its course by digging in the sand. From a few miles inland its banks are covered with vegetation, and indeed these long dry river oases are a frequent and pleasant feature of this part of the Protectorate.
Although large sums of money must have been spent upon the attempt at a harbour at Swakopmund, it appears to be a very qualified success. There is a stone jetty that offers some protection to tugs in fine weather, but ships have to lie in the roadstead, and when the prevailing gales are blowing landing is both difficult and dangerous. The township boastsquite a number of good buildings, and is a credit to the orderly ideas of German officialism. A good deal of ore was being brought down by rail from Otavi, a copper-mine some 250 miles north-west, connected by a 2-feet gauge line. This and the landing of a tremendous amount of army stores, waggons, and artillery made the port quite a busy one. And an Englishman whom we met at the hotel told us that the amount of stores landed during the latter part of the recent Hottentot and Herero rebellion had been enormous, and that depôts were being built all over the country inland to allow of their storage. Considering that the two races were practically wiped out at the time peace was declared, it is difficult to understand what all these stores and munitions of war are needed for.
We went to Windhuk on the third day, a slow and tedious journey of 237 miles which took us over twenty-four hours to accomplish.
At Swakopmund the coastal sand-belt is at its narrowest, a short run of a few miles taking one clear of the dune region; thence the country, though sterile, is broken and hilly, and the line gradually ascends towards the plateau that forms the interior. Here the scenery—after the awful monotony of the sandy wastes near the coast—was interesting and in places not without beauty; hill and plain, mountain and river-bed, succeeding each other, and the latter, though dry, being in most cases extremely well wooded. Many of the mountains are lofty, and most of them are table-topped. Windhuk is a pretty place. Lying nearly 5,000 feet above sea-level, it is built in a rocky plain surrounded by hilly and picturesque country. Vegetation is abundant, as the rainfall is good; moreover, there is an abundance of water, mostly obtained from thermal springs in the hills to the north of the settlement. There are five of these hot springs, ranging in temperature from tepid up to nearly boiling-point, and many of the houses have this water laid on in pipes. It is also used when cold for irrigating gardens, etc., but inaddition there are cold springs that issue from the limestone of the valley below.
RavineTHE TERRIBLE DESOLATION OF BARREN, RIVEN ROCK BELOW THE GREAT FALLS.
THE TERRIBLE DESOLATION OF BARREN, RIVEN ROCK BELOW THE GREAT FALLS.
THE TERRIBLE DESOLATION OF BARREN, RIVEN ROCK BELOW THE GREAT FALLS.
Boring has also produced water at no great depth wherever it has been attempted, and as in the rainy season (January to April) the rainfall varies from 15 to 20 inches, it can readily be seen that Windhuk, and in fact most of the neighbouring portion of Damaraland, is by no means badly off in that respect.
As in Swakopmund, the principal houses, public buildings, etc., were all new and well built, and the place was then rapidly growing; and with a good climate, and green trees everywhere, Windhuk is likely to become a most pleasant abiding-place.
Between the hills north of Windhuk there is a smaller settlement known as Klein Windhuk, which is situated in a very fertile valley, where vegetables and fruit are grown in abundance. Should some means be found for conserving the water which flows away in such abundance during the summer months, this and many similar valleys are well suited for the growing of mealies and lucerne, for which there is apparently a very great demand.
Windhuk was at that time an important military station; in fact, the civilian population was insignificant, and the hotel was crammed with officers. Among these I met a Hauptmann, whom I will call Müller, who was a most striking contrast to the general run of overbearing, swashbuckling officers. He spoke English well and was most courteous and affable, especially when he learnt that I knew something of geology. He had just returned from a trip south to the Gibeon district, and he showed me some samples of excellent “blue ground”—Kimberlite—he had found there. He badly wanted me to return with him and prospect the place, but as I had made all arrangements to return to Luderitzbucht and Cape Town, I could not do so. And much to my regret, for his theory that these were the pipes from which the coastal deposits of diamonds had come originally was not as far-fetched as it appeared at first; for he explained it by a theory of glacialdenudation of such pipes in the remote past, and said there was abundant evidence everywhere that such action had taken place, and that the glaciers had travelled from north-east to south-west right across the country to the sea.
As I could not go, I suggested to Du Toit to do so, but this he would not do, as he got on with the Germans worse than I did; in fact, if they treated me with scant courtesy, they treated Du Toit with none!
These Germans profess to despise the Boers, and many of the latter who fled into German territory rather than accept British rule after the Boer War had been very glad to return to the protection of the Union Jack.
Meanwhile Hauptmann Müller very kindly lent me a horse and took me round the settlement, talking incessantly the while of the future of the Protectorate, of which he had a great opinion. He had been in the Cape Colony and Transvaal, and spoke with admiration not unmixed with envy of our rich mines and splendid resources.
“We came late,” he said; “you English had all the good land. But now we have diamonds and copper here, and when the Protectorate pays we will develop the country—that is, if we have not fought you before then.” For this refreshing man made no secret of his belief that war between England and Germany was inevitable. “You English have the pick of the world,” he said, “but you cannot keep it! You have no army, and we are building a navy that will equal your own. And when ‘The Day’ comes we shall smash you up and take what we want, and you will decline into a little second-rate Power. We must do so; you cannot confine us to Europe and the waste places of the earth.”
He told me that a toast I had heard in the hotel was being drunk all over the German Empire, and that every officer longed for the war. “It means their chance, it means promotion to them,” he explained;“your Empire is declining, it has seen its day; and now comes Germany’s.” We parted perfectly good friends, and I certainly preferred his impudent frankness to the scowls and surly demeanour of most of his compatriots.
Returning to Swakopmund, we caught theFrieda Woermannback to Luderitzbucht, and in that comfortable little liner had a very different trip from the one we had experienced in Jim’s cutter. At that time the skipper of this well-known coast boat was an enormously fat man, and his chief engineer was built on the same lines, and it was a standing joke, whenever they happened to appear on deck together, for the passengers to rush in mock panic to the opposite side of the ship, with the avowed intention of balancing her and keeping her from capsizing. But they were a very harmless, good-natured old pair, and played scart interminably.
Luderitzbucht was still prospecting-mad, but apparently no new discoveries had been made of any great importance, and new regulations were being promulgated at such a rate, and such restrictions were being placed upon diggers and prospectors, that men were beginning to leave the country. So frequent and so contradictory had been these new regulations, that it had often happened that men who had been absent on a pegging expedition for a week or two would return to find that the new laws rendered all their work useless. In short, there appeared very little scope for us there; and after one or two abortive trips to spots we had heard of, and which we found to be useless or already pegged, we decided to return to British territory.
We were strengthened in this resolve by what we heard from a relative of Du Toit’s: a certain Stuurmann, who had been in German employ during the whole of the Hottentot rebellion, and was one of the many Dutch transport-drivers living in the Boer camp just outside Luderitzbucht. This chap had at one time followed the Orange River from its mouth up to the Great Falls, and the account he gave of certain spots on its banks, and notably of hugestretches of gravel near the Great Fish River mouth, made us all eagerness to get there as soon as possible. The description of these gravels tallied, it is true, with the blank patches we had gone so far after, but in this case, we argued, they were near that possible source, the Vaal River Diggings; and though we had followed similar patches in vain from Prieska down to below the Great Falls, there remained this 150 miles of the almost unknown lower reaches, and they had always appealed to us!
Moreover, Stuurmann said that in places he had noticed innumerable bright crystals sparkling in the gravel there, and had never even picked them up, as in those days he had had no thought of diamonds. At any rate, here was a place where a prospecting party would not be handicapped by being followed by “claim-jumpers,” as was happening here at Luderitzbucht, or have to contend with constantly changing mining laws; besides, there were no Germans there, and that appealed to us almost as much as the diamonds! But a properly organised expedition would be necessary, and to arrange this we decided to return to Cape Town first.
This Stuurmann was a most interesting man to talk to; he had been all through the Hottentot campaign, and had the greatest contempt for the fighting power of the Germans. Towards the latter end of the campaign, he said, they had begun to learn a little and adapt themselves to the conditions the country demanded of them; but even so he (Stuurmann) considered that with a good commando of burghers he would take German South-West from them any day! And this was the opinion of his mates, between whom and the Germans there was very little love lost; though to be but just, their employers, the Government, paid these Boer transport-drivers extremely well.
Stuurmann also gave me much interesting detail as to the terrible treatment meted out to the unfortunate natives, both Herero and Hottentot, who were unlucky enough to fall into the hands of the Germans.
I had seen something of this myself, and had heard more from ex-German soldiers themselves, who with extraordinary callousness used to show whole series of illustrated postcards, depicting wholesale executions and similar gruesome doings to death of these poor natives. One of these, that enjoyed great vogue at the time, showed a line of ten Hottentots dangling from a single gallows, some still standing on the packing-cases with a noose round their necks, waiting for the soldiers to kick their last standing-place away; some kicking and writhing in the death struggle, for the short drop did not break their necks, but only strangled them slowly, and one having a German soldier hanging on to his legs to finish the work more quickly. And each and every German soldier in the photo was striking an attitude and smirking towards the camera in pleasurable anticipation of the fine figure he would cut when the photo was published. This, I repeat, was only one of many that enjoyed a big sale in German South-West for the delectation of admiring friends in the Fatherland. Absolutely no mercy was shown to these unfortunate creatures: they were made to dig big graves, and were shot down by the hundreds beside them, whilst practically the whole remnant of both races who escaped this fate were exterminated in the detention-camps at Luderitzbucht and Swakopmund. Towards the end of the long, dragging war, the Germans conceived the plan of sending Herero prisoners captured in the north for internment to Luderitzbucht, where they were strangers to the country and where escape was hopeless, whilst the Hottentots captured in the south were sent north to Swakopmund.
There is a small low-lying promontory in Luderitz Bay known as Shark Island, and here the Herero prisoners were crowded in thousands, shelterless, with no proper supply of food or water: and here, huddled together like penguins, they died like flies.
Often on a blazing day, such as is common in Luderitzbucht, they received no water whatever,either having been forgotten, or the supply having failed; the food(?) supplied them was never sufficient for a tithe of them, and they often fought like wild animals and killed each other to obtain it. There were also a large number caged in a wire enclosure on the beach; these were slightly better off, as, although they received no rations from the military in charge of them, a few of their number were let out each morning and went ravenously foraging in the refuse-buckets, bringing what offal they could back to their starving fellow-prisoners. Cold—for the nights are often bitterly cold there—hunger, thirst, exposure, disease, and madness claimed scores of victims every day, and cartloads of their bodies were every day carted over to the back beach, buried in a few inches of sand at low tide, and as the tide came in the bodies went out, food for the sharks.
Now, Stuurmann and the other men who told me these things were no negrophiles (a Boer as a rule has an excellent idea as to how to keep a native in his place as the white man’s inferior), but so terrible had been the treatment of these natives by the Germans that even these case-hardened transport-drivers spoke of what they had seen with the utmost horror and abhorrence. Yet these men are looked down upon as an inferior race by the Germans, who themselves, as far as the troops and officials in German South-West are concerned, are utterly devoid of all humanity when dealing with natives. I saw much of the trait myself later; it is unpleasant and distasteful, and bodes but ill for the future relations of white and black in the German colonies.
I was by no means sorry to leave Luderitzbucht, for during the whole of this brief stay it blew incessantly and the air was a sort of semi-solid mixture of whirling sand, that cut and stung, and choked and blinded, and permeated every orifice and crevice, and generally made life utterly unbearable. When this prevailing wind reaches a certain violence, the whole country practically gets up and walks, big sand-dunes shift along and others come after them,like the waves of a slowly moving sea; wide stretches of hard land are denuded of every grain of sand, and others buried deep in it, and it is a curious fact that these storms actually blow diamonds! A claim deep with diamondiferous sand has often been swept clean of its contents in a few hours; sand, gravel, and diamonds being lifted up and borne away, to be deposited in some more favoured spot. Even the big dunes of a hundred feet or so in height are not stationary; though their movement is slower, it is none the less sure. In many instances these huge sand-waves have passed slowly but irresistibly over strongly built dwellings and the like, burying them completely for a time, and gradually passing onward and re-disclosing them....
We came down the coast in theHellopes, an alleged passenger-boat that rolled like a hog and smelt like its sty; and we were both very glad to see Cape Town again.