The glamour of prospecting

by Fred C. Cornell

Late in the afternoon we climbed the last rise that hid our view to the east, and saw below us a long valley widening in the distance and flanked by abrupt and lofty peaks. The range to the left was continuous and almost vertical, leading to the serried peaks directly ahead that hid the Orange. We got down a breakneck slope into this valley, and found the usual sand-river that made fairly easy going. As usual there was no vestige of a trail, the whole land being apparently devoid even of animal life, silent, deserted, melancholy. We followed the sand-river till nightfall, and slept on its clean soft bed; and we hoped by following it patiently we should surely come to the Orange, but just after our start in the morning it branched in several directions. Whilst uncertain which to follow, we came upon the spoor of a naked foot, old, but showing up clear and fresh in the sand, and so unusual a find, in this deserted country, that we gazed upon it with something like the feelings of Robinson Crusoe on a like occasion. As in all probability it would lead us to the river or to other water, we decided to follow it. It led us on for hours, up branch-ravines we should never have thought of entering, and at length into a narrow gap in the abrupt wall of mountains. At the mouth of this gap we found the “Lost Water” that Klaas had heard of, a beautiful little pool of clear spring-water surrounded by reeds and a tree or two, an ideal little oasis in the desert. But, with the exception of the solitary and obviously old spoor that led us to it, there was no sign that the place had been visited for many years. The only indication that man had ever been there before were a few bleached and gnawed human bones under the biggest tree—possibly those of him who had made the spoor!

The valley was full of good grass, there was sufficient water for a good herd of cattle, but the whole land lay deserted. Probably the fact that the valley is hemmed in by mountains on all sides keeps the Hottentots from visiting it, and there are many such spots in this little-known region. Having found the water, we pushed on for the Orange, though as we approached the mountains that hemmed it in I began to despair of ever getting through, so rugged and precipitous were they. Our only hope was to follow the principal dry river-bed, though these often end in a cul-de-sac. But our luck held, and after interminable twisting and turning in what was surely the most tortuous ravine of all this labyrinth, getting gradually into the heart of the mountains, and being confronted, time after time, with a seemingly impassable barrier, we suddenly found the narrow passage blocked by a bank of dry silt 15 or more feet in height. Over this a sheer precipice faced us, seemingly but a few yards distant, and it appeared that the Orange must be beyond it, and that we must seek another path. But, scrambling up the silt, we saw dense trees immediately below us and heard the song of birds again, and within a few yards had burst through the undergrowth and were on the bank of the river. The precipice was on the farther side, in German territory, a sheer mountain face rising abruptly from the water, which at this spot was scarce a hundred yards from bank to bank. The narrow belt of vegetation on either bank had scarce clinging room, and above rose the wall of mountains. Much of the rock was crystalline limestone, beautiful marble, white and pink, whole mountains of it. The narrow belt of trees was extremely hard to break through, though old blaze marks on certain big trees showed we were not the first to visit the spot, as we well might have been. There were leopard spoors everywhere, and whole troops of baboons on the rocks above. We made our horses fast on a patch of grass and worked our way along the bank for a mile or so, but as far as we could see no other outlet pierced the cliffs on our side of the river, and upstream our way was soon blocked by a place where vegetation ended and the vertical cliff overhung the black water. The spot, though beautiful, had something awe-inspiring about it: the sight of this big body of water, silent, lonely, and mysterious, flowing from unknown reaches, pent in between these gigantic walls, and so hidden in this land of thirst through which it flows that the wayfarer might well die of thirst within a few hundred yards of it, appealed strongly to the imagination of men who, like ourselves, had the fear of thirst and the anxiety of constantly searching for water always before them.

We swam over to the German bank, where a bare 10 feet of soil clung to the base of the cliff. High up on the latter the marks of ancient floods showed that a rise of fully 40 feet above the present level had more than once occurred; and, remembering that heavy rainfall up-country might at any time bring a repetition, we resolved to get out into the open again as soon as possible. So we stayed but the one night, in the middle of which Ransson’s horse was cruelly mauled by a leopard, which meant that we had to walk most of the way back to “Quagga,” where we found the “boys” just organising a search-party to look for us. A jackal had haunted the camp every night we had been away, and they had no doubt whatever that it was the K’nas, or spirit jackal, and that one of the party was doomed. To their horror Ransson said that for his part he believed the jackal was the doomed party, and, sure enough, that evening he shot the poor animal. Unfortunately, he did not bring it into camp, but left it lying about a hundred yards away, where he shot it, and in the morning it was gone. Probably a hyena had taken it, for both the stronte wolf and the tijger wolf are common in these mountains; but we could see no spoor, and of course this circumstance was a triumphal vindication of our “boys’” belief in the supernatural character of the visitor. They clucked and jabbered more than ever they had done, and were obviously scared out of their wits and likely to desert.

Old Klaas told us that in addition to the “Ghost Jackal,” these hills were the haunt of a big snake with the head of a goat, which devoured men. Many men had seen this snake, men he had known had been taken by it, and every Richtersfeldt Hottentot believed in it. According to Klaas, it had a playful little peculiarity of being able to emit a blast of air so strong that it would knock down a man whilst still many yards distant from it. It is in no way to be confounded with the Ki-man of the “Groot Rivier,” which, as I have described, we had already sought the acquaintance of unsuccessfully. I asked Klaas if any trace of this goat-headed monstrosity had been seen around our camp, and he said, “No,” but they had heard it repeatedly for the last two days.

“Hark!” he said, a moment later; “there it is,” and the other “boys” stood in strained, listening attitudes, with fear written upon their faces. We listened too ... all we could hear being the deep cooing of the large speckled-breasted rock-pigeon. At least so it seemed to us. But Klaas would have none of our laughter; he said, in effect, that we were deaf as all white men were, and could not tell one sound from another; and truly deaf we were in contrast to these Hottentots, whose sight and hearing were marvellously acute. Anyhow, we got our guns and tried to locate the sound, but could not; not a “boy” would follow us and we saw no pigeons, and the sound was so baffling that, though it never seemed far away, we had to give up without discovering what really made it. It is quite conceivable that very large rock-pythons still exist in these mountains, but we saw none, though some of the puff-adders were so huge as to almost point to their belonging to another species to the ordinary “puff.”

These and a large number of the small horned adder (Cerastus) and an occasional cobra were the only snakes, and all of these were greatly feared by our “boys.” They all carried an antidote to snake-bite in the shape of a few dried chips, twigs, and bark of a small shrub they call gif houd (poison-wood). On being bitten by snake or stung by spider or scorpion, they chew some of this, immediately applying some of the pulp to the wound, and swallowing the remainder. Peculiarly enough, they dread in particular the small sand-gecko, which is so numerous that at sunset its cricket-like chirrup is heard everywhere, and which all scientists assert to be harmless. But the Hottentots believe it to be deadly, and quote numerous cases of men being found dead with a sand-gecko in their clothes or blankets.

But to return to our gold-seeking, which we did day after day, whilst the water dwindled, as did our hopes. Not another speck of gold did we find, nor did any test that my small field laboratory allowed me to carry out give me any encouragement. The likeness to Rand banket was remarkable, the important difference being that the gold was wanting. And convinced of this at last, and with an additional reason in the fact that we had lived for days on klipbok flesh alone, without bread, and short rations of nearly putrid water, we despondently packed up our gear and returned over the mountains to Kuboos.

Here I got letters, including certain instructions which sent me bucketing off again to Zendling’s Drift, accompanied only by Klaas, whilst Ransson and his henchman proceeded to a spot about twenty miles lower downstream. My work at Zendling’s concluded, I tried to rejoin him by following the river-bank; but after two days of cutting and hewing through densely tangled thorn scrub and fallen trees, I found that, with a horse at any rate, it was impossible to make a way through, and had reluctantly to make a long detour through the mountains. I was absolutely out of stores, and the last two days Klaas and I lived on a tin of jam and a small tin of rancid sardines, without bread or any substitute for it. And I was therefore glad to find Ransson with a steaming three-legged pot full of flamingo. He shot these each day with a rifle as they strutted on a sand-spit on the German side, for his stores were finished too, and we had no chance of replenishing. And there was still a good deal to be done. But good as the flamingoes tasted, they soon got shy and we were often extremely hard put to it, for there was no game near this spot. And so I came to actually enjoy dassie, and to forbear to turn my nose up at roasted leguaan’s tail, and to be thankful for a good many other weird dishes which I had, perhaps, better not particularise.

Varied as was our diet, however, our work was now monotonous, and, as it lay in ground already described, would be of little interest to the reader; and a few weeks later we returned to Port Nolloth and Cape Town. Before proceeding to the latter I travelled again to Steinkopf to endeavour to find out more of a certain big diamond that a native had once sold there for a waggon and a number of oxen, but could get no definite information, as the man had left the mission some time. Mr. Kling, however, promised to get me full information later; meanwhile he was confident upon one point: the stone had come from somewhere above the Great Falls, and my thoughts travelled back to Brydone’s story and the “pans” of the Kalahari.

Meanwhile these two long trips in the least-known part of Klein Namaqualand had made a profound impression upon me. True, we had tried in vain for gold, but we had been misled into frittering much valuable time away, and, considering the size of the region we had penetrated, we had, after all, barely scratched it. There were hundreds of reefs we had not even sampled, hundreds of gullies where the most promising-looking gravels lay deep and undisturbed, for we had been handicapped by the Namaqualander’s greatest handicap—want of water. Copper there was in bewildering abundance, galena, iron, and the other base metals on all hands, and in the few places where water had allowed of “panning” the results had often been surprising. But widely distributed as were these mineral riches, it was perfectly obvious that to exploit them to any advantage would mean a colossal scheme with a colossal capital.