There was an occasional break in the routine in the shape of a longer trip in search of other prospects, and more than one night spent far away on the wide veldt, with the path lost; but by remembering the cardinal fact that a line due south on the plateau would always bring me to the escarpment which could be followed “home,” I always got back with no worse experience than being half frozen, for the nights were now very cold, and the days glorious with bright sunshine, and the air like dry champagne. One day, in trying to make my own way to Zwartmodder, across the veldt, I got badly out of the path, and night found me in dunes as wild as any I had seen in the Reserve, and in which a bitterly cold wind froze me to the marrow as I crouched under a bush till morning, clad in nothing but a thin shirt and trousers.
I was, as I afterwards found, a bare ten miles from Zwartmodder; but in these very same dunes, only a few years back, a police trooper lost his way and died of thirst.
One other trip that will never be forgotten was to the Noup Hills again, and into the famous Oorlogs Kloof, where, with Gert and a Bastard named Nicholas Cloete, I made one more bid for “Brydone’s diamonds,” and, failing them, for the tijgers that infested the wild gullies there.
But that I have striven all through this narrative to avoid all shooting yarns, I could let my pen run on for a full chapter over that particular hunt and the strange things I found there; but I must leave all that, and pass on to the end of May, when, after six weeks of systematic work and exhaustive search in all directions, I was in possession of data that made a trip to the nearest telegraph-station imperative. This meant Ukamas, the German township I have mentioned, and which so far I had avoided.
I therefore rode down to our own police post, and reported that I was taking a horse over the border, for which I had obtained the requisite permission before leaving Upington; thence I rode on to the German post, and had to give minute particulars as to who and what I was, whence from, and whither bound, to the little trooper in charge there. I had had several chats with the little chap before; he spoke French extremely well, and was, I believe, an Alsatian. Anyway he was a very obliging chap, and quite unlike the uncouth, brutal troopers of the regiment stationed at Ukamas. This ordeal over, and a full description of both myself and my horse entered in the Ne Varietur kept for the purpose, I rode the eighteen miles into the little frontier town over good, well-defined roads laid out by the military, and with a valuable aid to the traveller at every cross-road in the shape of a stone signpost giving distance and direction to inhabited places in the locality.
Ukamas, although but a tiny village, and a very long distance from the railway at Kalkfontein, was certainly a credit to the Germans, the post-office, houses, and barracks being attractive-looking, substantially built edifices, most of them, I was given to understand, having been built by the military stationed there, many of whom were artisans.
There was one Englishman in the place, a Jew store-keeper, who had at one time been in the British Army, and who was on that account baited in the most intolerable manner by the officers and soldiers who were the principal customers of his bar. From this little outpost I was able to send a cable to Cape Town, the post-office operator being, like every other official in the place, a soldier. Here my horse had to be handed to the military vet, for the mallin test, and I was kept kicking my heels for some days in the forlorn little stores, where every evening the rough troopers, in their long blue-grey greatcoats, congregated to drink beer and play scart, smoking the big cigars that form part of their rations, and cracking alleged jokes at the expense of the little Jew landlord and of the rough-looking prospector sitting so quietly in a corner.
These men, however, rough and overbearing as they were, were harmless compared with their officers, who drank to excess in front of their men, and whose intolerable treatment of the Englishman behind the bar used to compel me to get out and right away from them, lest I should be unable to control myself and get into trouble.
They picked no quarrel with me personally, for though I was roughly dressed, I had shown my Foreign Office passport to their superior, and I suppose they had been told to let me alone. But they talked at me as I sat there quite quietly pretending to read, talked about what a poor lot all “Englanders” were, anyway, and how only the worst of them ever came to Africa, and how they, the Germans, the salt of the earth, were bound, sooner or later, to take over the whole of it from the Cape to the Zambesi, and a lot of other balderdash, all in front of their admiring men. Then, as the beer began to work, they would start on D. about the British Army, what rank he held in it, if all the officers were like him, and so on till they got the little man rattled. Their crowning witticism would come when he dived down beneath the counter for more beer for them, when at a signal all four of them would bring their riding-whips down on the rickety counter, with a crash close to his head, to show their men “how an English officer could stand fire”!
This never failed to bring down the house, and send me flying out before I got into serious trouble. How the man stood it beat me! It is true that these officers were subalterns only, but in any other army in the world they would have been cashiered, for never a day passed but that they were vilely and blatantly drunk in full sight of their men. Especially was this the case on the Sunday when they were celebrating the approaching departure of the veterinary surgeon for Germany, and when, at eleven o’clock in the morning, they reeled from their quarters arm-in-arm and staggering drunk. In the bar for the rest of the day they excelled themselves, and I again heard the toast of “The Day” being drunk, though I did not imagine, as I sat there with my hands itching, how soon that “Day” would come.