As in Swakopmund, the principal houses, public buildings, etc., were all new and well built, and the place was then rapidly growing; and with a good climate, and green trees everywhere, Windhuk is likely to become a most pleasant abiding-place.
Between the hills north of Windhuk there is a smaller settlement known as Klein Windhuk, which is situated in a very fertile valley, where vegetables and fruit are grown in abundance. Should some means be found for conserving the water which flows away in such abundance during the summer months, this and many similar valleys are well suited for the growing of mealies and lucerne, for which there is apparently a very great demand.
Windhuk was at that time an important military station; in fact, the civilian population was insignificant, and the hotel was crammed with officers. Among these I met a Hauptmann, whom I will call Müller, who was a most striking contrast to the general run of overbearing, swashbuckling officers. He spoke English well and was most courteous and affable, especially when he learnt that I knew something of geology. He had just returned from a trip south to the Gibeon district, and he showed me some samples of excellent “blue ground”—Kimberlite—he had found there. He badly wanted me to return with him and prospect the place, but as I had made all arrangements to return to Luderitzbucht and Cape Town, I could not do so. And much to my regret, for his theory that these were the pipes from which the coastal deposits of diamonds had come originally was not as far-fetched as it appeared at first; for he explained it by a theory of glacial denudation of such pipes in the remote past, and said there was abundant evidence everywhere that such action had taken place, and that the glaciers had travelled from north-east to south-west right across the country to the sea.
As I could not go, I suggested to Du Toit to do so, but this he would not do, as he got on with the Germans worse than I did; in fact, if they treated me with scant courtesy, they treated Du Toit with none!
These Germans profess to despise the Boers, and many of the latter who fled into German territory rather than accept British rule after the Boer War had been very glad to return to the protection of the Union Jack.
Meanwhile Hauptmann Müller very kindly lent me a horse and took me round the settlement, talking incessantly the while of the future of the Protectorate, of which he had a great opinion. He had been in the Cape Colony and Transvaal, and spoke with admiration not unmixed with envy of our rich mines and splendid resources.
“We came late,” he said; “you English had all the good land. But now we have diamonds and copper here, and when the Protectorate pays we will develop the country—that is, if we have not fought you before then.” For this refreshing man made no secret of his belief that war between England and Germany was inevitable. “You English have the pick of the world,” he said, “but you cannot keep it! You have no army, and we are building a navy that will equal your own. And when ‘The Day’ comes we shall smash you up and take what we want, and you will decline into a little second-rate Power. We must do so; you cannot confine us to Europe and the waste places of the earth.”
He told me that a toast I had heard in the hotel was being drunk all over the German Empire, and that every officer longed for the war. “It means their chance, it means promotion to them,” he explained; “your Empire is declining, it has seen its day; and now comes Germany’s.” We parted perfectly good friends, and I certainly preferred his impudent frankness to the scowls and surly demeanour of most of his compatriots.
Returning to Swakopmund, we caught the Frieda Woermann back to Luderitzbucht, and in that comfortable little liner had a very different trip from the one we had experienced in Jim’s cutter. At that time the skipper of this well-known coast boat was an enormously fat man, and his chief engineer was built on the same lines, and it was a standing joke, whenever they happened to appear on deck together, for the passengers to rush in mock panic to the opposite side of the ship, with the avowed intention of balancing her and keeping her from capsizing. But they were a very harmless, good-natured old pair, and played scart interminably.
Luderitzbucht was still prospecting-mad, but apparently no new discoveries had been made of any great importance, and new regulations were being promulgated at such a rate, and such restrictions were being placed upon diggers and prospectors, that men were beginning to leave the country. So frequent and so contradictory had been these new regulations, that it had often happened that men who had been absent on a pegging expedition for a week or two would return to find that the new laws rendered all their work useless. In short, there appeared very little scope for us there; and after one or two abortive trips to spots we had heard of, and which we found to be useless or already pegged, we decided to return to British territory.