A Rip Van Winkle of the Kalahari, and Other Tales of South-West Africa

For here was this wonderful old professor, who had already been a surprise packet to Dick in several ways, weighing in with a most finished and artistic lie, just in the nick of...

I awoke to the tortures of the damned, crushed, broken and in agonizing pain, and with the aasvogels tearing at my face. Pinned to the earth as by some great weight, my hands we...

By this time the sun was high in the heavens, and I realized that if I would make a bid for life I must do it soon. Buffeted and almost choked with the battle of the past night,...

The prospector to whom the syndicate owning the fields had entrusted the important task of locating the most likely spots on which to demonstrate their richness, had with admira...

The whole camp had now clustered round the fallen men, the professor grotesque in his thickly lathered face, Dick intensely interested and enjoying this fall-out among thieves,...

Water! Delicious cold water, being dashed in my face and trickling down my parched throat, brought me again to my senses. I lay, sore and bruised and with throbbing head and lim...

Filled, as I could but be, with thankfulness at my escape from captivity and from an awful death, I did not realize for a time what the loss of the diamonds meant to me; indeed...

And then voices in my own tongue, low voices in the tongue I had not heard for so long; and kind English faces coming and going beside my bed, and mingling with my dreams.

Now gazing down full upon me as though in exultation was again the awful face of the Snake, with its diadem the great, bright diamond. Its glare hurt me, and I tried to move my...

We scraped a hasty grave in the sand for the poor remains, and stood gazing silently across the dunes in the direction that the fresh spoors showed the two poor creatures had co...

I don't know how long I gazed in fascination at the wonderful stone, but at length a low chuckle from Inyati brought me back to reality. He stood looking at me, with a whimsical...

MOST of these stories were written on the veldt; at odd times, in out- of-the-way prospecting camps, in the wilds of the Kalahari Desert, or of that equally little-known borderl...

Diamonds first brought me to this country--a small glass phial full of them in the hands of an old sailor who had been shipwrecked on the South-west African coast, somewhere in...

To be "broke to the world" was by no means a new experience to Dick Sydney, and as he sat on the sandy shore near Luderitzbucht and watched the setting sun turn the broad ocean...

Sydney could not disguise from himself the fact that the situation was rather serious. The escapade would probably mean a sentence of a stiff bout of imprisonment, or a heavy fi...

"Well, we never seen 'im agin, and when I told the prospectors wot I'd seen, they told me to put more water in my grog. And at last the whole outfit went back and reported the p...