CHAPTER IV
MORE DIAMOND RUMOURS—PROSPECTING IN A MOTOR-CAR—VAN RYN’S DORP—PROSPECTING IN EARNEST—A PATRIARCH—NEWS OF BUSHMAN’S PARADISE.
In Cape Town I found rumours of new diamond deposits were as rife as they had been in German territory, and had scarcely rubbed the Luderitzbucht sand from my eyes before I was called upon to go and verify a new “discovery,” this time much nearer home.
By this time the craze had so spread that people were arguing that, as diamonds were found in sand at Luderitzbucht, the sands all up the coast might be full of them, and wild and indiscriminate pegging was going on all over the place.
Amongst other local syndicates, one had been formed for the purpose of investigating certain deposits alleged to still remain undiscovered on both the German coast and our own, which spots were only known to the promoter. The “plum” of these spots was an alleged deposit of “blue ground” which the discoverer claimed to have found many years before at a wild part of our own coast, when landing from a sealing cutter. The exact locality was kept a dead secret, but when, one fine morning, the papers blossomed forth with the alleged discovery of diamonds near Lambert’s Bay, about 150 miles north-west of Cape Town, the owner of the map declared that it was near enough to his “discovery” to render instant action necessary.
Within a few hours the syndicate had sent for me, and the same day four of us were jammed into a small motor-car en route for the spot. “Take nothing but what you stand in,” ordered the owner (and driver); “we shall be back in four days!”
Cars were few and primitive in those days, and the roads we had to traverse were as primitive as the car. For a long time the owner of the map would not show it, or give more than a vague notion of where we were bound; but eventually Malmesbury and Eendekuil, then the terminus of the railway in that direction, were left behind; we climbed the difficult pass of “Pickaneer’s Kloof” and spent the first night dragging the rudimentary car through the sand-drifts below Macgregor’s Pass. We broke down hopelessly at red-hot little Clanwilliam, hearing to our dismay that there was another ahead on the same errand, and after maddening delay splashed on again, in pouring rain, through a terrible track leading to Van Ryn’s Dorp, along the steep mountain slopes skirting the Olifants River. The four days we allotted for the whole trip were taken up in reaching Van Ryn’s Dorp, a remote little village on the road to Namaqualand, and where our car created a mild sensation, for it was the first to be seen there. Away to the right of the dorp towered a magnificent isolated table-mountain, its reddish sides as sheer as gigantic walls.
The sun was just setting, and I shall never forget the marvellous effect upon the huge buttresses of “Matsie-Kamma,” as the mountain is called, for the towering cliffs appeared as though turned into golden molten fire, whilst over it hovered a peculiar cloud, similar to the “Tablecloth” of Table Mountain. Behind ran a long escarpment of similar flat-topped mountains, and on them the glow was rapidly fading through a whole gamut of exquisite shades between crimson, mauve, heliotrope, and purple, till on them the sun had completely set, and they stood out a cold clear indigo against the cinnamon and green of the sky.
But we had other things to think of besides mountains or sunsets: we wanted to get to our “diamonds.” The car could go no farther towards the coast, but a Cape cart could, and early next morning we were off again, and, toiling through an awful track, we slept that night at the “back of beyant,” the little mission station on the dreary sand-flats of Ebenezer. By this time we had forced the “discoverer” to disclose his map, and found we had to go to the mouth of the Olifants River, cross it to the barren, waterless, almost unknown and uninhabited coast north of it and find our way to a remote sealing-station some distance up that coast.
I will not weary the reader with a recital of all the asinine things that happened before we got to the spot, but suffice it to say that at nightfall one evening, footsore, hungry, ragged, and half dead with thirst, we found the little hut where the sealers lived, a most desolate spot many miles away from drinking-water. The sealers—all coloured men—were oily and grimy to a degree, but they looked askance at us when we burst in upon them in the clothes we had left Cape Town in! Tattered, torn, dusty, covered in melkbosch-juice from the thickets we had traversed, they took us for a shipwrecked crew. It was dark by the time we had explained what we were after.