The glamour of prospecting

by Fred C. Cornell

He said, “You’re not. I’m going to take you down—and the horses.”... And he did.

We tried in either direction for about an hour; but my way it only got worse, and I could only hold on, and look over and feel giddy. At times Ransson whooped at me from some awful perch, and I bleated back; then he remembered Whymper again and tried to “yodel.” Luckily, about then, little Samuel shouted to me, and getting back to the horses I found that he had discovered a place where a descent for a man might be practicable, though for horses it looked madness.

Samuel said we must wait for the nacht zon (night sun), as he called the moon, and so in the dark we sat and waited for it to rise, whilst the “boys” clucked and muttered and Ransson sucked his empty pipe and took intermittent counsel from Whymper by matchlight, and I funked and worried and wondered why I hadn’t the moral courage to take the whole crowd back! At long last came the moon, and we started, Sam in advance, then Ransson and his horse, then Jacob and the pack-mule, whilst I led my horse, and the expedition, strategically from the rear. For two hours we clung and stumbled and slid diagonally across and down that almost perpendicular face, clinging to shrubs, following cracks where we actually had to place the horses’ hoofs for them, urging them to scramble over horrible little water-worn places where, once they lost momentum or hesitated, they must have gone to the bottom, and eventually striking a very narrow ledge where there was sand and a firmer footing. I hugged myself, for we surely must be half-way down; in fact, I had just begun to whistle from sheer relief when Sam—who had gone on ahead—came back.

We must go back, he said; it was impossible to get through that way; we must try back above the sand.

Then Ransson went and had a look, and at last I did myself. The sand-gully ended in a fairly level patch flanked by titanic granite boulders, and, creeping between, we again looked down a sheer precipice—in fact, this particular spot overhung the sand about three hundred feet below. We were dog-tired, and I refused flatly to go a step farther in the treacherous moonlight. So we off-saddled and turned in, the last straw being our discovery that the water-bags on the pack-mule were empty, bone dry. The “boys” had been helping themselves; and that night we thirsted.

In the morning, parched and anxious, we started back and tried another route, and after four hours of nightmare, during which Ransson, who was now ahead, absolutely built a path for the horses over hundreds of feet, we came safely to the bottom.

A couple of hours’ hurried trek and we reached Gauna Gulip, passing plenty of springbok on the way and not even troubling to shoot at them—we were too thirsty.

We found the water in the sand-hole practically finished, and the trickle quite insufficient to satisfy us, and had to be content with a kettleful of the horrible stagnant liquid from the open pool, foul, stinking, and full of animalcules. We strained it through a handkerchief and made some coffee, and after a brief rest again trekked up the river-bed, coming at sunset to the base of an abrupt range of fantastic peaks which appeared impassable. Here we found a tiny pool of fairly good water, and as our guides told us the huge nugget of native copper we had come to see lay in the slope above us, we cried a halt and slept there. In the morning, to my dismay, I found that Ransson had fever, and though he climbed up to look at the copper, he was manifestly ill. Close by the tiny pool of water there stood an old deserted hut of dry branches which offered some little shade from the terrific heat, and into this he crawled, having taken the last of our quinine, whilst I took hammer and cold chisel and made my way once more up to the big nugget. It is an enormous mass of absolutely pure copper, 4 or 5 feet in length, with a girth of 7 or 8 feet—and weighing several tons.

I endeavoured to cut off a projecting point with hammer and chisel, the big mass of metal giving forth a most sonorous, bell-like sound at every stroke I struck, and the effect of the loud ringing clang echoing from peak to peak in this wild and desolate spot was startling in the extreme. The mass has been rolled down from the spot, some 40 feet above, where it once formed an outcrop, and here a shaft of about 8 feet has been sunk, disclosing a thin vein of native copper leading down from it.

This big “nugget,” which is by far the largest discovered in South Africa, and is only equalled in size by the huge masses of Lake Superior, belongs to Mr. Giffen, a Port Nolloth prospector.