A fine fowl-run and an apiary gave additional proof of their industry, and considering their distance from civilisation, and the fact that the post was barely eighteen months old, they had done wonders; but any admiration I felt for them and their work died a sudden death when I walked through that same garden, and found that the work was being done by Herero prisoners working in chains. Not light chains, but heavy manacles on legs and arms, and neck and waist, manacles that were never taken off till they knocked them off when they died. These men, as far as I could gather, were “prisoners of war” only—not criminals in any sense of the word as we understand it. I am no negrophile, but German methods of treating natives are far too heartless for “the likes of me.”
The day after our first visit to German territory, the clan of Hottentots that had proved such a nuisance flitted, taking with them most of our able-bodied men, and we saw them no more. The few that remained worked better without them; but as Klaas Fredericks had taken every goat and sheep with him, we could no longer give our labourers the vleesch they insisted upon, except by going far afield and bringing back an occasional buck.
Thus, with our difficulties always on the increase, we spent a couple of most arduous months, only deterred from throwing up the venture by a firm belief that the diamonds were there somewhere; often ill with fever, hard up for food, and quite cut off from all news of the outside world. Our only amusement was in trapping animals as the Germans did, improvising traps from spare sieves, and baiting them with small birds. Scarce a day passed but that the traps were full, and in this manner we caught, alive and unhurt, wild-cats, ratels, iguanas, and several of the beautifully spotted “leopard cats”—or genets, to give them their proper name. On more than one occasion a muis-hond (the South African skunk) got into the traps, and made its presence known by the most appalling smell, and a tree leguaan (iguana) once gave me an awful shock, for he lay so quiet under the leaves covering the sieve that I thought it was empty, and the dart of his head—so like that of a snake—made me fall back in the thorn-bush, for I thought I had bagged a huge puff-adder.
Towards the end of our stay provisions got so low, and game so wild and scarce, that we had to spend most of our time after it, and one day, whilst looking for a square meal, I had rather a peculiar experience.
About two miles above the Drift, and near the Lorelei Mountain, we spotted a flock of ten or a dozen wild geese floating near the German bank, and Dittmer emptied his magazine at them, killing three. The river was still in flood, and with the perversity usual in such cases, the geese floated into the German bank. We wanted them very badly, and as Dittmer could swim but little, it was up to me to go across and get them. Helped by the current, I got across the muddy, turbulent water fairly easily and got the geese, and as I had drifted a long way downstream, I got out with the intention of walking up the bank to opposite where my clothes lay. The thicket on the north bank was dense and teeming with monkeys, baboons, and all sorts of animal life; it was thorny too, and I was as full of spikes as a porcupine, as I picked my way gingerly along the bank upstream, feeling horribly helpless—for, naturally, I had nothing on but a hat—and looking out carefully for snakes.
Seeing an open space with tall reeds, I decided to cut across it, but had scarcely got among the bush vegetation of this swampy place, when at my very feet I saw a huge spoor in the black mud, so freshly made that the water still oozed into it, and at the same time heard an awful snoring grunt close to me, answered by another, and realised that I was right among a herd of hippo. I had seen traces of this small herd before at their favourite haunt, higher up near the Great Fish River. There were but four or five of them, but remnants of the hundreds that swarmed the Orange when Alexander first crossed and described it.
As a rule, of course, hippo are harmless, but at times the huge brutes are mischievous, and I did not stay to inquire what kind of mood they were in, but sprinted back across the river in a manner that left little to be desired. But I brought the geese.
At length food and labour became so scarce that we were compelled to give up; a messenger was sent to Kuboos, and a few days later the waggon made an appearance. We struck camp, filled in our prospecting-holes, blew up our dynamite in a deep pool in the river, as a parting salute to the Germans, and took the home trail, feeling that we had put up a good fight against sheer bad luck. Lack of natives and other adverse circumstances had hampered our work so that, in spite of our own hard labour, the few holes we had been able to make had been no real test of the huge beds of gravel, which, with proper appliances and systematic testing, will very probably some day yield very different results.
Our bad luck lasted us right to Cape Town. The waggon got hopelessly stuck in the Holgat River, and delayed us so that we missed the only decent boat at that time running, had to kick our heels for an interminable week in Port Nolloth, and finally were obliged to take passage in a glorified tug, with several other unfortunates, and take ten long days in coasting round to Cape Town—a trip of 36 hours by the boat we had missed! Moreover, we were loaded from cut-water to taffrail with a cargo of guano, the concentrated odour of which was the only thing we tasted during the whole of the voyage. Dittmer landed ill, and within a few days was down with diphtheria, which was generally ascribed to the rough living and bad water we had to put up with during the trip, but which I put down to that over-generous diet of guano.