The glamour of prospecting

by Fred C. Cornell

THE CAMEL POST AT ZWARTMODDER, GORDONIA.

The proximity to the German border was rendered noticeable in Upington principally on account of the prevalence of German money there. Practically no English silver was to be seen, and except at the post office the cheap, trashy-looking mark passed for and purchased the equivalent amount of a shilling’s-worth.

I have already alluded to the fertility of the silt on the banks of the Orange River, but scarcely believed the statements of some of the inhabitants until, later, I saw with my own eyes the marvellous crops that it is capable of producing. Oranges, especially the variety known as the “Washington Navel,” grow to a profusion, perfection, and abundance truly wonderful, as do peaches, grapes, and in fact almost every variety of fruit; though both soil and climate seem to favour the various varieties of citrus most of all.

Between the trees of the carefully cultivated groves the farmers grow lucerne, which again thrives astonishingly, crop following crop almost as fast as it is cut, eight or nine times a year being quite common. Unfortunately, the irrigable land consists of a comparatively narrow strip averaging about half a mile in width, though there are spots where it is much wider, and in many places the river is split up into numerous channels enclosing densely wooded islands, which, wherever cleared and cultivated, give the same abundant crops. Lower down the river a certain amount of grain is grown, and it is claimed that wheat has here yielded the wonderful harvest of 246 bushels for one of seed—surely a world’s record? Altogether it needs no prophet to predict that the time will come when this long, winding oasis through the desert will be populated and utilised from end to end, as it deserves to be. But except for a brief drive or two we saw but little of this fertile belt on this visit, for within twenty-four hours of our arrival we were en route again, this time in a Cape cart drawn by eight sturdy oxen, who are far better able to cope with heavy sand than are horses or mules, and whose steady, untiring walk or jog-trot gets them over the ground at a far quicker rate than would appear. As we were now entering a region where water is at its scarcest, we carried a considerable quantity of this prime necessity, a small cask, several tin cans, and a big canvas water-bag and aluminium water-bottle each. Our driver was a Boer who had been in the camel police, and knew the road to the north well, and for voorleir we had a diminutive Hottentot Bushman boy with the most marvellous eyesight imaginable. Often this queer, monkey-faced little chap would call our attention to game far ahead of us, the long neck of a paauw among the bushes, a good 500 yards away, and which our field-glasses hardly showed us, or a tiny steenbok standing motionless among cover at double the distance; and his dexterity at picking up a spoor and following it was almost superhuman.

He knew each and every hoof-mark of his own eight charges even when they were mixed up with hundreds of others at the various water-holes, and he often pointed out the spoor of animals in the hard stony places that occasionally divided the dunes, and where the closest scrutiny of my own fairly good eyes showed me nothing. He was a source of perpetual interest to me, and taught me a good deal of veldt lore on that long trudge to the north. But our driver was by no means a pleasant man; he was a taciturn and bad-tempered individual who hated and despised all Englishmen and took little pains to conceal the fact, and within twenty-four hours of leaving Upington I was hard at work trying to keep the peace between him and my companion. The latter was a young Englishman, an accountant from Cape Town who had put in a good veldt apprenticeship in the B.B.P. in Rhodesia, and who, finding our driver would not be companionable, wanted to punch him. This I would have been very pleased to let him do thoroughly, but having left Upington, and with no other team or teamster to replace him, it would have been extremely bad policy. Moreover in some cases he was not at fault! For instance, G. was constantly accusing him of cruelty to his oxen, but this was only apparent, or in some cases necessary. G. wanted to push forward, as I did, and could not understand the arbitrary manner in which we trekked, outspanning in awful spots for hours in the sun without an atom of shade, pushing on in the dark when G. wanted to sleep, and above all stopping for hours in the night to sleep, and keeping the oxen tight-spanned in their heavy yokes. This “unnecessary cruelty,” as G. termed it, annoyed him so much that one night when we were all asleep he quietly let them loose, “so that they could have a good sleep, poor things,” as he put it. A few hours later, when inspan time came, there was trouble, for the “poor things” had cleared, some on the back trail for home, two old hands straight ahead to the next water-hole, and the rest due east into the real dunes of the forbidden Game Reserve, where there was an abundance of grass. The result was a day’s delay in retrieving them, and in future G. admitted the driver knew his own business best. Indeed, trekking in these deserts is an art in itself, bound by laws that are only known to men who know the roads intimately; and to attempt to trek a certain number of hours, and outspan a certain number of regular times, is out of the question. In the hottest time of the day, when the sand is almost red-hot, the oxen cannot and will not trek; then, whatever happens, at sunrise and sunset they must be loosed and rested for a while, and the problem is made more difficult by the necessity of finding grazing for them en route, and, above all, watering them. Much of our trekking was done at night, when oxen travel well, but this was a great drawback in many ways, as it left us ignorant of much of the country travelled through. All up the border, which, as I have before written, is the 20th degree of east longitude, there stretches a narrow fringe of desert “farms,” many of them huge blocks of 20,000 morgen (roughly 40,000 acres) each, mostly, too, of barren, sandy, waterless land, “farms” indeed only in name. Some of them have one or two water-holes, some have none whatever. A few have so-called “homesteads” on them, generally a forlorn dwelling little better than a hovel, though there are one or two exceptions of a better type. But wild and desolate as are these stretches of land, many of them are capable of sustaining large flocks of sheep, goats, and cattle; indeed, the number of fat beasts running on certain of these inhospitable-looking wastes is surprising. And the “poverty” of the scattered inhabitants is not nearly as bad as it appears, their wretched homes and the squalor of their surroundings being almost as inexcusable as their appalling filth. This latter was the more noticeable at some of the farms along the Molopo, the dry bed of which eventually forms the route north, where water can always be found on boring. Often there is an aeromotor and a well-built stone dam full of water, stagnant and filthy and full of animalcules for the want of cleaning out; and from this filthy pestiferous brew the owners would dip the drinking-water for their needs, rather than take the two minutes’ trouble of unhitching the motor and getting a splendid stream of crystal water, flowing pure and fresh from the abundant supply below. Of course there were exceptions, but the bulk of these degenerate people apparently never dreamed of washing themselves, except when they made their periodical visit to nachtmaal at far-distant Upington. The vicinity of one of these “farms” was usually heralded by an appalling smell, for generally in the near vicinity were to be seen several swollen, rotten carcasses of goats, cattle, sheep, or horses, dead of lungziekte or nieuwziekte or paardeziekte, or one of the many diseases that had recently devastated the animals in these parts.

No matter how near they might have died to house or water, no attempt appeared ever to have been made to drag the putrid carcass away or bury it, and the offal of slain animals usually strewed the vicinity of the house to the very doorstep. Quite recently an epidemic of typhoid had devastated the whole of this border region, and I believe many learned treatises were written as to what peculiar form of fever it may have been and how it originated—but surely the cause was not far to seek!

However, we jogged steadily along, and after one or two experiences gave these places as wide a berth or as short a visit as we possibly could, and this much to our driver’s disgust, for naturally he wished to visit all of them, spend an hour or two in gossiping at each, and whenever possible sleep in the ferret-hutch atmosphere of their interiors at night, instead of out under the stars as we did. Still, De gustibus non disputandum holds good in Gordonia as elsewhere, I suppose, and as long as he did not delay us and kept his distance for a while afterwards, we did not mind where he slept.

It is not my intention to turn this account into a guide-book description of the journey, most of which was absolutely featureless and uninteresting, but a brief outline of the route followed might be of interest.

Trekking from Upington at 5 one evening, we kept on steadily till 11, when we turned in on the cool sand and slept comfortably till 4.30, when we started again, and at 7 o’clock passed the deserted copper-mine at Areachap, which had but recently been closed down, and presented the sad sight of a beautifully equipped and rich little mine being beaten in its struggle for existence by the heavy handicap of being situated 170 miles or so from the nearest railway. Rich heaps of ore lay there ready to be carted away, there was much valuable machinery going to rack and ruin, and the buildings must have cost a large sum to erect; and here it stood, alone and deserted in the midst of the solitary waste of veldt, guarded only by a couple of coloured “boys”—a sad monument of man’s energy wasted in a hopeless fight against adverse circumstances, or worse! The tall yellow shaft was visible hours after we had left it, a most prominent and incongruous landmark in the wide expanse of desert.