CHAPTER IV
MORE DIAMOND RUMOURS—PROSPECTING IN A MOTOR-CAR—VAN RYN’S DORP—PROSPECTING IN EARNEST—A PATRIARCH—NEWS OF BUSHMAN’S PARADISE.
In Cape Town I found rumours of new diamond deposits were as rife as they had been in German territory, and had scarcely rubbed the Luderitzbucht sand from my eyes before I was called upon to go and verify a new “discovery,” this time much nearer home.
By this time the craze had so spread that people were arguing that, as diamonds were found in sand at Luderitzbucht, the sands all up the coast might be full of them, and wild and indiscriminate pegging was going on all over the place.
Amongst other local syndicates, one had been formed for the purpose of investigating certain deposits alleged to still remain undiscovered on both the German coast and our own, which spots were only known to the promoter. The “plum” of these spots was an alleged deposit of “blue ground” which the discoverer claimed to have found many years before at a wild part of our own coast, when landing from a sealing cutter. The exact locality was kept a dead secret, but when, one fine morning, the papers blossomed forth with the alleged discovery of diamonds near Lambert’s Bay, about 150 miles north-west of Cape Town, the owner of the map declared that it was near enough to his “discovery” to render instant action necessary.
Within a few hours the syndicate had sent for me, and the same day four of us were jammed into a small motor-caren routefor the spot. “Take nothing but what you stand in,” ordered the owner (anddriver); “we shall be back in four days!”
Cars were few and primitive in those days, and the roads we had to traverse were as primitive as the car. For a long time the owner of the map would not show it, or give more than a vague notion of where we were bound; but eventually Malmesbury and Eendekuil, then the terminus of the railway in that direction, were left behind; we climbed the difficult pass of “Pickaneer’s Kloof” and spent the first night dragging the rudimentary car through the sand-drifts below Macgregor’s Pass. We broke down hopelessly at red-hot little Clanwilliam, hearing to our dismay that there was another ahead on the same errand, and after maddening delay splashed on again, in pouring rain, through a terrible track leading to Van Ryn’s Dorp, along the steep mountain slopes skirting the Olifants River. The four days we allotted for the whole trip were taken up in reaching Van Ryn’s Dorp, a remote little village on the road to Namaqualand, and where our car created a mild sensation, for it was the first to be seen there. Away to the right of the dorp towered a magnificent isolated table-mountain, its reddish sides as sheer as gigantic walls.
The sun was just setting, and I shall never forget the marvellous effect upon the huge buttresses of “Matsie-Kamma,” as the mountain is called, for the towering cliffs appeared as though turned into golden molten fire, whilst over it hovered a peculiar cloud, similar to the “Tablecloth” of Table Mountain. Behind ran a long escarpment of similar flat-topped mountains, and on them the glow was rapidly fading through a whole gamut of exquisite shades between crimson, mauve, heliotrope, and purple, till on them the sun had completely set, and they stood out a cold clear indigo against the cinnamon and green of the sky.
But we had other things to think of besides mountains or sunsets: we wanted to get to our “diamonds.” The car could go no farther towards the coast, but a Cape cart could, and early next morning we were off again, and, toiling through an awful track, we slept that night at the “back of beyant,” the little mission station on the dreary sand-flats of Ebenezer. Bythis time we had forced the “discoverer” to disclose his map, and found we had to go to the mouth of the Olifants River, cross it to the barren, waterless, almost unknown and uninhabited coast north of it and find our way to a remote sealing-station some distance up that coast.
I will not weary the reader with a recital of all the asinine things that happened before we got to the spot, but suffice it to say that at nightfall one evening, footsore, hungry, ragged, and half dead with thirst, we found the little hut where the sealers lived, a most desolate spot many miles away from drinking-water. The sealers—all coloured men—were oily and grimy to a degree, but they looked askance at us when we burst in upon them in the clothes we had left Cape Town in! Tattered, torn, dusty, covered in melkbosch-juice from the thickets we had traversed, they took us for a shipwrecked crew. It was dark by the time we had explained what we were after.
“Blue ground!” said the foreman, an European. “Yes, it’s about half a mile up the coast! I’ll take you to it first thing in the morning.”
“So it was right, then!” we agreed. We accepted their hospitality, and, packed like sardines, tried to sleep on the floor of the hut, in an atmosphere of seal oil and rotten seals, whose huge carcasses polluted the beach for miles.
By daylight I was on the spot, peering through the raw sea-fog for the “blue ground” we had come so far to find.
It was there, cliffs of it, millions of tons of it, blue shale, utterly valueless, and, except in colour, bearing no atom of resemblance to diamondiferous “blue ground”!...
It took us best part of a week to get back to Cape Town, and I swore that nothing would ever induce me to try prospecting in a motor-car again!
Even our short absence had allowed of more stories coming through as to rich finds in German West; moreover, there were rumours as to the finding ofdiamonds in Namaqualand at no great distance from the spot we had just returned from; and a week or two later I set out alone, with the intention of properly prospecting the country in the vicinity of Van Ryn’s Dorp, and, if needs be, northward into Namaqualand. But this time I did not go “as I stood,” but with a complete and compact outfit of tent, tools, gear, and provisions for a prolonged period. These I sent ahead by waggon to Van Ryn’s Dorp, following myself by post cart a fortnight later, and doing the journey in half the time and with a tithe of the discomfort I had experienced in the motor-car.
At Van Ryn’s Dorp I heard the encouraging (or disquieting) news that a very finely equipped expedition had passed through a few days before, going north after diamonds, which they professed to have found on a previous trip. I therefore obtained a small donkey-waggon and team, with a coloured driver and two boys, and pushed on to Zout River, a stream running from the direction of Little Bushmanland into the Olifants, and on the banks of which some years previously a fine diamond had been found. The exact spot was at the bridge over which ran the lonely but important road to Namaqualand and the north, and from this spot my actual prospecting began. And from the first I had interest of the most absorbing: for if there is any country in the world where encouraging prospects may be found, it is in that same north-west region. The stream facilitated prospecting, it was crystal-clear, and with abundant water; but unfortunately, as the name implies, it was salt, salt as brine and undrinkable even for the donkeys! All along its banks there were “indications” of minerals, and all alike proved to be but “indications.” Heavy gravel led to my washing systematically all along its beds for diamonds, and finding promising but baffling results in the sieve. Using a prospecting-pan for possible gold gave me similar results: here and there a tinyyellow “tail” at the end of the pan showed that gold had been there, but all efforts to trace it to its matrix failed.
Copper there was in abundance, though in small and isolated occurrences; here and there grains of tin showed among the black titaniferous iron-sands of the river: and iron and galena were everywhere. In fact, so multitudinous were these various “indications,” and so barren of tangible result was the following-up of any and all of them, that I began to realise that the description that had been applied to the north-west as being the “Land of Mineral Samples” was not much exaggerated! Still, day after day I worked along towards the Olifants, finding my results getting poorer and my water getting shorter every day. The whole region was most bewildering; it was as though the waste from a big assayer’s laboratory had been dumped all along that stream, and none of the “samples” found led to anything but a big note of interrogation.
At last, in a tiny side-stream, I found some minute nuggets of gold, and my hopes rose; moreover, a native “herd” whom I chanced to come across told me that a big white reef ran right across this same stream a few miles up, and that he had always heard there was “goud” in it. So I abandoned my laborious panning and struck up the stream, and found a wide quartz reef just as he had described, but no trace was there of gold in it.
Lower down this “Zout” river I came into an astonishing region of brilliantly coloured clays and marls, ranging in colour right through the gamut of reds, yellows, and blues, as also a fine deposit of milk-white Kaolin; and these in turn gave place to high banks of a sort of volcanic mud, or ash, of a bright blue colour, through which the stream had cut a deep bed. These high banks or mounds exactly resemble the huge tailings of the Kimberley diamond-mines, both in appearance and in substance: and, indeed, this deposit is apparently analogous to Kimberlite minus its various inclusions.
I should have much liked to explore this wild anddesolate part of the country farther, but water was now our chief anxiety; moreover the land from hereabouts was private property, upon which the hampering restrictions of a prospecting licence did not give me the right to prospect “without the consent of the owner!” This owner, I found from my boys, was nothing more than a coloured man who leased the land from Government for a few pounds per annum to run his goats on; moreover he did not live on the property, but a good two days’ trek away, so I did not trouble to obtain his consent. I merely mention thisen passantto show by what absurd conditions a prospector is bound. Here was a man, absolutely ignorant of minerals, and with absolutely no right to them (for they are Crown property in such cases), and yet a miserable lease, which only granted him surface rights, still made him the arbiter as to whether a licensed prospector should set foot on his 10,000 morgen or so of land!
Of course there was no one to stop my prospecting, but had I done so and made any discovery I could not have legalised it without his consent, and being made to pay through the nose for it! The system is utterly wrong. There are millions of acres of land in the Cape Province held under such terms, the owners or lessees of which will neither put a pick in themselves nor allow the prospector to.
By this time the weather was getting bitterly cold, hoar frost lying thick every morning, and the water freezing even in my little patrol tent. And as there was no firewood obtainable, and the two “boys” were suffering badly at night, I decided to work upstream toward Little Bushmanland, as I had heard that the upper reaches of this little river had plenty of wood. So we loaded up and trekked for a day towards a “farm” rejoicing in the name of “Douse the Glim.” In this direction I found wood in abundance, and the “boys” built themselves a tinypondhoekof boughs and branches, and by keeping a roaring fire going just outside of it all night they managed to keep from freezing.
Here we had to send the donkeys a full day’s journey away for water and grazing, and had to fill our water-barrel periodically from the same place, and here—although in a comfortable camp—my luck was no better than lower down the river. Samples of all sorts, “indications” in abundance, and nothing more. Along these upper reaches, however, I found many masses of a ferruginous gravel hardened almost into conglomerate and containing a small portion of gold, but in no case sufficient to pay for working in such a remote region. These gravels are in appearance identical with certain Australian gravels which are both gold and gem bearing, and may probably have been the source of the diamond that had been found lower down, and of the gold I saw traces of. During the three weeks that I had been out, thus far, I had seen but one solitary human being except my two “boys,” the herd who had told me of the gold reef; for, although but a day’s ride from Van Ryn’s Dorp, the region is a very solitary and deserted one, much of the land beingbrak(alkaline) and unfit for stock to run on.
So that the life, though not without interest, was a very lonely as well as a very hard one; so cold were the nights that the two blankets I had brought utterly failed to keep me warm even when I turned in “all standing,” and I soon abandoned my canvas camp-stretcher for a warmer lair on the ground itself. Then at daybreak, Sam, the elder of the “boys,” would make coffee, and with a hurried snack of food we would start off for the day, carrying pick, shovel, sieve, and pan, and food and water for midday. Thus I tried the whole of the adjacent country systematically, sieving the grounds in the stream-bed and “gravitating” them (a diamond-digger’s trick) when water was sufficient, or using the prospecting-pan for the purpose of finding traces of gold or other metals.
When water failed, or the “indications” occurred far from it, small portions of the concentrates of sand and gravel would be bagged and tied up andlabelled separately, the same applying to samples of rock taken from various parts or depths of a reef. All these samples had in any case to be carried back to water, and, in the case of rock, to camp, where each portion had to be carefully pounded into the finest powder by pestle and mortar before it could be tested for the mineral it might contain—hard and laborious work, varied by drilling holes in hard rock for dynamite charges, or “gravitating” concentrates in ice-cold water till the brine cracked the hands and caused most painful sores. Then, the day’s work over, sunset would often find us miles from camp, and we would trudge back, and load ourselves up with dry wood for the night’s fire, and feel too tired to attempt to cook.
Boer meal was the staple food; a big three-legged pot of it boiled into steaming “pap” made an excellent breakfast, and every few days I would bake a batch of “roster kookies,” little flat cakes made of the same meal with a little baking-powder to make them rise, and baked over the embers on a “roster,” or gridiron. Or occasionally I allowed the “boys” to make me a big loaf similar to their own, the composition being the same, but in this case the dough was massed into a loaf shaped like a flat Dutch cheese: the embers were thrown aside and the loaf buried in the ashes, and covered deep in them. Bread thus baked is of course very hard and often burnt on the outside, but when this is cut away it is excellent.
Of fresh meat we had none, and although I gave the “boys” plenty of such luxuries as bully beef, sardines, and golden syrup, they pined for the flesh-pots of Egypt in the shape of their dearly loved sheep or goatvleesch. But there were no sheep in the locality; and although Sam spent the whole of a Sunday away at a farm about ten miles off, he failed to bring any meat back. The next Sunday, however, both of them cleared off in the early morning and did not return till nearly dark, when they brought in a big goat between them. Within a few minutes the head was off and buried in the ashes, and the kniveswere at work cutting up a big pot ofvleesch. Then Sam cut off a leg and brought it to me. He spoke English quite well, did Sam. “Baas,” he said, “here is thegeldt; I did not pay for this bok, he was present!” “Present!” I said, in surprise, for sheep-farmers do not usually refuse good money for their small stock. “How was that, then, Sam? Who gave you it?” “Nie,” he replied; “it was an ou baas of mine, I work for him once. And this bok he little sick, so the ou baas give him for present! Baas like me cook somevleeschfor him, now?” “No,” I said, with feeling; “very good of you, Sam, but I won’t deprive you of it. Little sick, was it? Well, well!”
All that night the camp sizzled and smoked, and certainly that “sick bok” smelt good! They ate his head, baked in the ashes; they ate a big potful of boiledvleesch, and promptly put in another; they cut strips of him and broiled them on the embers, his internal arrangements frizzled and smoked and were devoured by the yard. I had my cold bully beef to the accompaniment of a really most appetising smell, smoked a pipe and turned in, and still they ate on. Whether they ate all night I cannot say, but certainly, when I woke again in the morning, they still sat there eating, and the remains of the “bok” looked very sick indeed.
At length I became convinced that, whatever might exist in this wild district, diamonds certainly did not, and I determined to make a flying trip to the north-east, towards the long escarpment of mountains that stretched all along the horizon in that direction, and which was apparently the watershed from which the various rivers and streams of the country (now mostly dry) had had their source.
ManT’SAMMA IN THE DUNES.
T’SAMMA IN THE DUNES.
T’SAMMA IN THE DUNES.
DesertIN THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN KALAHARI.
IN THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN KALAHARI.
IN THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN KALAHARI.
There were no roads in the right direction, and the country was too rugged to allow of using the cart, so I determined to “hump my swag.” Leaving one man in camp, I took Sam with me, and we carried food for six days (kookies, biltong, and the like), a small trenching tool, sieve and pan, a canvas bagand water-bottle and a blanket. Even this minimum of necessities meant at least 50 lb. weight for each man, and was more than was comfortable for such rough country and long distances as we were bent on covering; but it was our only chance of visiting a certain valley where again diamonds were supposed to exist, and which I had set my heart on visiting. We found, as is usual in such cases, that the mountains seemed to recede as we progressed, and although we did a good fifteen miles before night, we appeared very little nearer them. During the whole day we saw no human being, though we saw sheep once on the flank of a kopje: nor did we find a drop of water the whole distance, much of which was up the courses of dried-up streams.
About sunset we were lucky enough to find a few trees flanking one of 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 thenorth, but had “earned enough,” and was on his way back to Calvinia, where he belonged. He had expected to findtrek boerenat 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 plugtabaki, 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 carriedwas 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 theafternoon, 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 manychildren 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 aSchermand 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 hishuis. 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 andlying 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 baddopthat I was afraid to smoke anywhere near their breath. They were genial kind of savages, however, and once thedopwas finished we got on very well together. We had to make a detourby way of their dwelling, a canvashuissimilar 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 tovoetsack, 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 turnedup 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 nativepondhoekbefore 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. Hehad 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.