The glamour of prospecting

by Fred C. Cornell

INTERNATIONAL BEACON IN THE BAK RIVER, BORDER OF GERMAN SOUTH-WEST.

Morning showed us that, though the Cape cart had certainly performed miracles so far, it could go no farther. For, though the Orange had emerged from the narrow Falls cañon, it was still pent in by steep, precipitous peaks on either bank, which in parts went towering up skywards from the water with scarce foothold for a goat. Just where we were there was a dense belt of vegetation, for the side-ravine through which we had reached the main stream widened somewhat at the mouth. Among the thick trees we found a deserted hut, but the Hottentot guide we had hoped to find there had gone. However, de Wet had been to this place before, and he said we could get downstream to the mouth of the Molopo, where we should find a few Hottentots who might act as porters, for the cart must go round. By going back to Waterval and taking a circuitous route, it could get to a spot near the German border, and there wait for us, whilst on foot we explored the maze of unsurveyed peaks between, and in which our goal was believed to lie. So we unpacked sufficient food, arms, and other necessaries for a week, and our driver turned back to try to circumvent the mountains. We were now absolutely “on our own,” each man having from sixty to seventy pounds of impedimenta to “hump,” and before we had gone a mile down the difficult bank of the river we were fervently praying that we should find Hottentots at the Molopo; otherwise, once we really got amongst the mountains, instead of skirting them, we should be terribly handicapped by our loads.

In places the path was treacherous, smooth, water-worn granite rocks sloping steeply, straight into the swift, muddy current below; at others it widened into a belt of thick and tangled wood, in which pheasants and guinea-fowl were calling, and grey monkeys chattered in the thick trees. At length our way was barred by an exceptionally formidable peak rising sheer from the water, and we followed a faint and difficult spoor leading over its steep flank inland. On cresting the ridge, we saw that, though the country beneath us was still broken and rugged in the extreme, it was comparatively open, and that for some miles, at least, the river was no longer pent between formidable walls of rock. On the south bank loomed a huge red mountain, flat-topped and striking-looking, even in this land of strange-shaped mountains. This mountain—“Zee-coe-steek”—as it is called, is the highest point in the Kenhardt district, and during the Boer War a helio station was established on its summit; but this had long been abandoned, and the southern bank in its vicinity is almost as unknown and deserted as the wild hills in which we were searching.

Opposite this mountain, and near the mouth of the Molopo, we found a few Hottentots, who made a beeline for the hills the moment they saw us. Luckily two ancient hags and some pot-bellied little kiddies could not get away, and when they found who we were, and that we gave them tobacco and sugar instead of the sjambok, they hobbled off into the rocks and soon brought the refugees back. They had taken us for Germans, and their actions spoke volumes as to how they fear the white men on the other side of the border. They were all refugees from Damaraland, who had fled after the brave fight put up by Marengo against the Germans had finally ended in their defeat. In this remote spot, cut off by difficult mountains and uninhabited country for many miles in all directions from even the nearest dwelling, they had existed unmolested, seeing scarcely a white man a year, yet always in fear lest their old taskmasters should appear on the scene. They existed chiefly on the milk of a few goats, honey from the wild bees in the rocks, dassies (rock rabbits), and barbel caught in the river. In a short time they were chattering and clucking round us in high glee, but though we promised them good pay (or its equivalent in goods once we got to the cart) to guide us and act as porters, they were most reluctant to do so. They feared to go into the wild ravines we were bound for, fearing thirst, the leopards with which they said the mountains swarmed, and most of all fearing the Germans, whose patrol parties were often to be met with on our side of the border.

But at length our arguments prevailed, upon a solemn promise that if we penetrated German territory, as we fully expected to do, we should in nowise force them to accompany us.

Having made the old women happy with tobacco and tea, we once more started, this time in light marching order with the Hottentots as porters, towards a peculiar conical kopje a mile or so downstream, which denoted the mouth of the Molopo.

We found the ancient river-bed (which can be followed right through the Kalahari to Kuruman) dry, and choked from bank to bank with huge mounds of sand, but a little farther up its course, where the banks were still exposed, there was ample evidence to show that in the not far distant past a huge volume of water had flowed. Even the miserable little channel, worn deep in the débris that chokes the old bed, and which shows where an occasional trickle of water finds a way down after rain in the desert, was now bone dry, and it was evident that once away from the Orange we should have anxiety about water.

It was on the western bank of the Molopo, on a ridge of abrupt kopjes leading to the higher land to the north, that our guide, de Wet, had stumbled on the old waggon in a recent trip, and from it we hoped to be able to shape our course for the diamonds. We found the remains of the vehicle as he had described it. It was obviously very old, the natives knew nothing of how it had come there, there was no vestige of path or spoor anywhere near—in fact, it seemed incredible that it should ever have been dragged there at all. But there it was, and, taking stock of the wild surroundings, we felt more certain than ever that we were hot on the scent. A huge ravine had been mentioned, deep-cut and profound. There, less than a mile away up the Molopo bed, showed the entrance to just such a place, deep and clear-cut in the sheer rock as though split out by the stroke of a giant axe. And the “strangely shaped mountain” to which it led, in the narrative? We turned as one man in the direction given in the book, and there, its crest well clear of the intervening foothills, was just such a hill. It appeared useless to traverse the ravine, for it must lead to the hill, and there was no need to follow the devious path taken by the first man. From the height on which we stood we could take compass bearings of that hill, and cut straight across country to it.

The guides clucked and jabbered and intimated that it couldn’t be done, but we knew better—or thought we did; and it did not look more than five or six miles.