I was most anxious to get back to Upington, but they inveigled me into returning with them to the Falls, and so for a few days I played at “roughing it” with them, and found it far from unpleasant after so much of the real thing. I paid my cow-driver exactly what I had agreed to, which astonished him, and he there and then declared his willingness to take my pack right on the 200-odd miles to the railway at Prieska, or, for the matter of that, to Cape Town if needs be! And he was quite hurt when I refused, but soon recovered under the stimulating effect of a visit to the store, where he bought tobacco, and sugar, and coffee, and golden syrup, and “Pain Killer” to his heart’s content, leaving on the home track with a pack almost as big as he had brought out.
CHAPTER XIX
RESULT OF KALAHARI TRIP—NAKOB—LACK OF POLICE ON FRONTIER—WORKING A KIMBERLITE PIPE—UKAMAS—DRUNKEN GERMAN OFFICERS—SLOW TREKKING—A BAD SMASH.
At Upington I took the preliminary steps for obtaining the right to prospect the lands to which the indications on the border had pointed, a task which proved both long and tedious. And meanwhile, whilst negotiations were still pending with the scattered and absentee owners of these huge desert farms, I at last received the Government’s decision as to the Kalahari. And it was an adverse one: admitting the interest of my report on this “unexplored” region, and even of its scientific value, but refusing to take my samples of Kimberlite, etc., as proof of the existence of diamond pipes in the Kalahari Game Reserve, and refusing me any further facilities in that direction.
So we had risked our lives and our money in vain, and all the castles we had built on those desert pipes met the fate at any time likely to overtake such edifices based upon the sand—of a Government promise.
However, it was no good squealing, and as soon as the right to prospect my newly found area was forthcoming, I started again for the border. This was on March 17th, 1914, when I left Cape Town with a full equipment of diamond-washing gear, to thoroughly test the region north of the Noup Hills, and in the immediate vicinity of the German South-West Border.
Handicapped by a heavy equipment, my progress from the railhead at Prieska was maddeningly slow, and it was not until April 8th that I at length reached my destination, Nakob, a tiny police post on the border, and the “port of entry” into German territory.
In spite of its comparative importance as the customs “port” for the southern trade-routes, this post at Nakob was one of the loneliest, most isolated habitations in South Africa.
It was simply a little shanty of corrugated iron so small as to barely afford shelter for the three troopers stationed there, and who, having no stable, tethered their horses amongst the thorn-trees near by. South of them stretched the wild country I have described, the Noup Hills and Bak River, with not a single inhabitant for the whole difficult day’s ride to the Orange, and more days beyond it. North of them, and wellnigh fifty miles away, was the similar post of Obopogorop where two other troopers were marooned, and thence a similar stretch of awful dune country had to be crossed to reach Rietfontein—the northern post of the camel police which I have already described, and where there were about a dozen men.
This represented the whole police force guarding (?) the long desert frontier of Gordonia and German South-West Africa—less than twenty men isolated and separated from each other by great distances of desert and difficult country, in many places cumbered by huge dunes of loose sand, through which transport was impossible, and which rendered long detours necessary. And these difficult, devious, and waterless paths were the only means of communication between them, for neither telephone nor telegraph-wire existed! Between them and their headquarters at Upington stretched a good eighty miles also of wellnigh uninhabited country, whilst their nearest store was at Zwartmodder, a tiny place in the bed of the Molopo, forty miles due east, and therefore that distance from the border.