I never knew his name, and had it not been that chance came to my aid, I should probably never have heard his strange history. But it so happened that a few days after our first meeting, a buffalo, with the finest horns I had ever seen, got up within twenty yards of us; and in my eagerness to secure his wonderful head, I shot badly, and only succeeded in wounding him slightly. His terrific charge was a thing to be remembered.
Straight at us he came, wild with rage, and my new friend's horse, gored and screaming, went down before him in a flash. The rider was thrown, and to my horror, before I could control my own frightened animal sufficiently to enable me to shoot, the bull was upon the fallen man, goring and trampling upon him in an awful manner. Leaping from my horse, I put bullet after bullet through the big bull's head, and at length he lurched forward, dead, upon the mangled body of his victim.
We had some difficulty in extricating the man, and never expected to find him alive, but though badly crushed and torn he still breathed, and naturally I did all I could to save his life.
That night he was delirious, and it was then that I had evidence of the almost superhuman strength with which he was endowed. Time after time he tore himself from the combined strength of my two sturdy boys, and always he raved of diamonds, and of a never-ending search for something, or some one, in the desert.
His hurts were sufficient to have killed half a dozen men, and I never expected him to live; but two days later he was able to tell the natives, in their own tongue, of certain herbs which they prepared under his direction, and in a week he was about again.
His cure was nothing short of miraculous in my eyes at least but he made light of his own share in the matter, and was all gratitude for the little I had been able to do to atone for the result of my bad shooting. And one night, by the camp fire, and with very little preamble, he told me the following strange story, which I have set down as nearly as possible in his own words.
A RIP VAN WINKLE OF THE KALAHARI
CHAPTER I THE BLUE DIAMOND
Diamonds first brought me to this country—a small glass phial full of them in the hands of an old sailor who had been shipwrecked on the South-west African coast, somewhere in the vicinity of Cape Cross, and who had spent many months wandering with the Bushmen who found him, before he eventually worked his way back safely to Walfisch Bay. Here one of the rare whalers, that occasionally called at that little-known spot, eventually picked him up, and he at length got back to Liverpool, with nothing but his tiny packet of little bright stones to show for all his months of hardship among the Bushmen.
The ignorant whalers had laughed at his assertion that the little crystals were of any value; as at that time diamonds were undreamed of in South Africa—for all this was long, long ago.