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 connectionwith 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 postshas 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 adventureen 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, whencewe 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 thespoorweg(railway) was coming, or roads were to be made, or a mine opened, or some kind ofGouvermentse werkto 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 hadleft, 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 Africaen 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, featurelesscountry, 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 shallowdriftsand 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 exceedinglyon 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.
FlowerA FLOWER OF THE DESERT, SOUTHERN KALAHARI.Flowering succulent, about 3 feet high.
A FLOWER OF THE DESERT, SOUTHERN KALAHARI.Flowering succulent, about 3 feet high.
A FLOWER OF THE DESERT, SOUTHERN KALAHARI.
Flowering succulent, about 3 feet high.
CamelTHE CAMEL POST AT ZWARTMODDER, GORDONIA.
THE CAMEL POST AT ZWARTMODDER, GORDONIA.
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 thetime 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 wereen routeagain, 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 forvoorleirwe 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 apaauwamong the bushes, a good 500 yards away, and which our field-glasses hardly showed us, or a tinysteenbokstanding 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. Thelatter 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 themen route, and, above all, wateringthem. 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 tonachtmaalat 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 ofgoats, cattle, sheep, or horses, dead oflungziekteornieuwziekteorpaardeziekte, 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 disputandumholds 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 machinerygoing 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-strewnaarsthat 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 despisedvogelkiesand pined for his belovedvleesch. 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 tripde 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, thevoorlooperof 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.