The glamour of prospecting

by Fred C. Cornell

Cautious inquiry elicited the fact that the man was well known, and lived but a mile or two away. And without loss of time, Paul and Borcherds set out to find him. He was a sly-looking Bastard, who at first strenuously denied that he had ever been to Steinkopf, or knew what a diamond was; but when he found we were not police, and that he had nothing to fear, he owned up. Yes! he had found three—big ones. One he had sold at Steinkopf, the others he had buried beneath a tree close to where he found them, for he believed that the police were watching him, and had feared to go near the spot again. We showed him our licences, and as he assured us the spot was on Government ground, we felt that all was indeed well in this best of all possible worlds.

The wily old fox drove a hard bargain with us, and in nowise would he tell us the whereabouts of his discovery. It would take us three or four days to reach it, that was all he said, and when, in trying to pump him, we mentioned that we had been to Bak River on a similar search, he smiled grimly and said, “You were on the wrong side of the river [Orange].”

This hint excited us more than ever. How if, after all, we had been on the wrong side, and the diamonds were lying within a mile or so of us, but across the water? True, the narrative seemed to apply to the north bank; but was it not possible that some point of the journey had been omitted, and the man who found the mine might have crossed to the south bank to reach the spot? Anyway, this remark of old Hendrick made us close with him. We held a council of war, and within a few hours had crossed the river into Kakamas, and were arranging to leave at once for a flying trip—somewhere.

De Wet had reluctantly to return to Upington, and our driver would in nowise consent to stay a day longer with us, and so we gave him our blessing, and let him go back likewise.

Kakamas, the celebrated “Labour Colony,” a community of over 3,000 souls living in isolation, five long days’ trek from a railway, is worthy of far more space than I can afford it here. Its one long straggling “street” extends for miles along the Orange River bank, the broad, flat alluvial stretches having by irrigation been connected into one of the most fertile spots in South Africa; fruit, vegetables, and cereals growing in a profusion unsurpassed.

There are numerous schools and churches, but never a hotel or boarding-house, and the nearest doctor for this populous place was at Kenhardt, full two days’ ride away. As a result, Borcherds was in demand immediately he was seen and recognised in the village, and within an hour was being mobbed.

So clamorous, indeed, were the population for his ministrations, that to us laymen it appeared quite needless for him to go away again looking for diamond-mines, with a gold-mine ready to his hand; but somehow he seemed a bit dubious about the gold!

Meanwhile we were busy. A Cape cart and good-looking team was engaged, stores were laid in, and long before Borcherds had got through with his patients we were ready. We gave him a little grace, and he lost no time in emptying his little travelling medicine-chest and joining us, and away we went westward again, this time at a spanking rate; for on the south bank there were at least some alleged roads. For many miles we still passed the straggling houses of the Kakamas colonists, which became poorer and poorer until they gave place to the hut, tent, waggon, or makeshift abode of the new-comers, who had as yet had no time to build. On through an even more remote outpost, the tiny little hamlet of “Rhenosterkop,” where an enterprising Hebrew had what was not to be found in all Kakamas, a fully licensed “hotel.” And thence through country scarcely less wild and but little less solitary than that of the northern bank. Part of Little Bushman Land, this northern extremity of Kenhardt, and notoriously a waterless country. But here and there a tiny farmhouse was to be found, at each of which Borcherds was received with open arms, and even we others basked in his reflected glory. Anyhow we got milk, eggs, and fresh meat, and began to realise that he was well worth his place in the cart. This time we visited Brabies, Nous, and Onderste Zwartmodder, whence a long waterless trek of twenty-odd miles brought us again to the wild country trending down to the Orange. We finally landed on the bank of the latter again, at a place called “Nourasiep,” considerably below Scuit’s Drift, and many miles lower than we had reached on the northern bank. Here we found a solitary inhabitant, a Hottentot herd, who was supposed to be minding cattle, but who had evidently heard of Borcherds’ being on the way, for he too was “sick.”

Hendrick now told us we were within half an hour of the spot where he had picked up the stone he sold, and two others which were still buried there, and our impatience to go and fill our pockets was so great that, without waiting for a meal (and we had had none that day), we urged him to take us to it at once. He led us away from the river, uphill, among a region of wide, well-defined quartz reefs, which were here and there very highly mineralised; and after a walk of a couple of miles he brought us to what he pronounced to be the actual spot where he had found the stones.

It was a small gully between granite dykes, which were seamed with quartz reefs, and a big outcrop of hæmatite in the latter had strewn the slopes and bottom of it with black crystals of that very widespread and—in such a place—worthless metal. And amongst all this débris of iron, he swore he had found the stones. There was not the remotest indication of any diamondiferous soil of any kind anywhere near the spot, and unless the diamonds had weathered out of the granite, or had been dropped there by ostriches, they could never have been there at all. Anyway, as Paul said, after we had searched every inch of the locality for hours, “How about those two that Hendrick had buried?”