The glamour of prospecting

by Fred C. Cornell

Lower down this “Zout” river I came into an astonishing region of brilliantly coloured clays and marls, ranging in colour right through the gamut of reds, yellows, and blues, as also a fine deposit of milk-white Kaolin; and these in turn gave place to high banks of a sort of volcanic mud, or ash, of a bright blue colour, through which the stream had cut a deep bed. These high banks or mounds exactly resemble the huge tailings of the Kimberley diamond-mines, both in appearance and in substance: and, indeed, this deposit is apparently analogous to Kimberlite minus its various inclusions.

I should have much liked to explore this wild and desolate part of the country farther, but water was now our chief anxiety; moreover the land from hereabouts was private property, upon which the hampering restrictions of a prospecting licence did not give me the right to prospect “without the consent of the owner!” This owner, I found from my boys, was nothing more than a coloured man who leased the land from Government for a few pounds per annum to run his goats on; moreover he did not live on the property, but a good two days’ trek away, so I did not trouble to obtain his consent. I merely mention this en passant to show by what absurd conditions a prospector is bound. Here was a man, absolutely ignorant of minerals, and with absolutely no right to them (for they are Crown property in such cases), and yet a miserable lease, which only granted him surface rights, still made him the arbiter as to whether a licensed prospector should set foot on his 10,000 morgen or so of land!

Of course there was no one to stop my prospecting, but had I done so and made any discovery I could not have legalised it without his consent, and being made to pay through the nose for it! The system is utterly wrong. There are millions of acres of land in the Cape Province held under such terms, the owners or lessees of which will neither put a pick in themselves nor allow the prospector to.

By this time the weather was getting bitterly cold, hoar frost lying thick every morning, and the water freezing even in my little patrol tent. And as there was no firewood obtainable, and the two “boys” were suffering badly at night, I decided to work upstream toward Little Bushmanland, as I had heard that the upper reaches of this little river had plenty of wood. So we loaded up and trekked for a day towards a “farm” rejoicing in the name of “Douse the Glim.” In this direction I found wood in abundance, and the “boys” built themselves a tiny pondhoek of boughs and branches, and by keeping a roaring fire going just outside of it all night they managed to keep from freezing.

Here we had to send the donkeys a full day’s journey away for water and grazing, and had to fill our water-barrel periodically from the same place, and here—although in a comfortable camp—my luck was no better than lower down the river. Samples of all sorts, “indications” in abundance, and nothing more. Along these upper reaches, however, I found many masses of a ferruginous gravel hardened almost into conglomerate and containing a small portion of gold, but in no case sufficient to pay for working in such a remote region. These gravels are in appearance identical with certain Australian gravels which are both gold and gem bearing, and may probably have been the source of the diamond that had been found lower down, and of the gold I saw traces of. During the three weeks that I had been out, thus far, I had seen but one solitary human being except my two “boys,” the herd who had told me of the gold reef; for, although but a day’s ride from Van Ryn’s Dorp, the region is a very solitary and deserted one, much of the land being brak (alkaline) and unfit for stock to run on.

So that the life, though not without interest, was a very lonely as well as a very hard one; so cold were the nights that the two blankets I had brought utterly failed to keep me warm even when I turned in “all standing,” and I soon abandoned my canvas camp-stretcher for a warmer lair on the ground itself. Then at daybreak, Sam, the elder of the “boys,” would make coffee, and with a hurried snack of food we would start off for the day, carrying pick, shovel, sieve, and pan, and food and water for midday. Thus I tried the whole of the adjacent country systematically, sieving the grounds in the stream-bed and “gravitating” them (a diamond-digger’s trick) when water was sufficient, or using the prospecting-pan for the purpose of finding traces of gold or other metals.

When water failed, or the “indications” occurred far from it, small portions of the concentrates of sand and gravel would be bagged and tied up and labelled separately, the same applying to samples of rock taken from various parts or depths of a reef. All these samples had in any case to be carried back to water, and, in the case of rock, to camp, where each portion had to be carefully pounded into the finest powder by pestle and mortar before it could be tested for the mineral it might contain—hard and laborious work, varied by drilling holes in hard rock for dynamite charges, or “gravitating” concentrates in ice-cold water till the brine cracked the hands and caused most painful sores. Then, the day’s work over, sunset would often find us miles from camp, and we would trudge back, and load ourselves up with dry wood for the night’s fire, and feel too tired to attempt to cook.

Boer meal was the staple food; a big three-legged pot of it boiled into steaming “pap” made an excellent breakfast, and every few days I would bake a batch of “roster kookies,” little flat cakes made of the same meal with a little baking-powder to make them rise, and baked over the embers on a “roster,” or gridiron. Or occasionally I allowed the “boys” to make me a big loaf similar to their own, the composition being the same, but in this case the dough was massed into a loaf shaped like a flat Dutch cheese: the embers were thrown aside and the loaf buried in the ashes, and covered deep in them. Bread thus baked is of course very hard and often burnt on the outside, but when this is cut away it is excellent.

Of fresh meat we had none, and although I gave the “boys” plenty of such luxuries as bully beef, sardines, and golden syrup, they pined for the flesh-pots of Egypt in the shape of their dearly loved sheep or goat vleesch. But there were no sheep in the locality; and although Sam spent the whole of a Sunday away at a farm about ten miles off, he failed to bring any meat back. The next Sunday, however, both of them cleared off in the early morning and did not return till nearly dark, when they brought in a big goat between them. Within a few minutes the head was off and buried in the ashes, and the knives were at work cutting up a big pot of vleesch. Then Sam cut off a leg and brought it to me. He spoke English quite well, did Sam. “Baas,” he said, “here is the geldt; I did not pay for this bok, he was present!” “Present!” I said, in surprise, for sheep-farmers do not usually refuse good money for their small stock. “How was that, then, Sam? Who gave you it?” “Nie,” he replied; “it was an ou baas of mine, I work for him once. And this bok he little sick, so the ou baas give him for present! Baas like me cook some vleesch for him, now?” “No,” I said, with feeling; “very good of you, Sam, but I won’t deprive you of it. Little sick, was it? Well, well!”

All that night the camp sizzled and smoked, and certainly that “sick bok” smelt good! They ate his head, baked in the ashes; they ate a big potful of boiled vleesch, and promptly put in another; they cut strips of him and broiled them on the embers, his internal arrangements frizzled and smoked and were devoured by the yard. I had my cold bully beef to the accompaniment of a really most appetising smell, smoked a pipe and turned in, and still they ate on. Whether they ate all night I cannot say, but certainly, when I woke again in the morning, they still sat there eating, and the remains of the “bok” looked very sick indeed.