CHAPTER ELEVEN.

THE RICHTERSVELD--KUBOOS--THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD REDIVIVUS-- GOLD-SEEKING--THE RAAD--MORBID SENSIBILITY--START FOR EL DORADO.

Just before the Orange River, wearied from its long travail, slides into the Atlantic, it bends in a sickle-shaped curve. Its course for the previous three hundred miles has been through the tremendous and almost inaccessible gorge into whose depths it hurled itself at the Augrabies Falls.

The incidence of those aggregates of men which pass, like the individual, through the successive stages of youth, maturity and decay, and which we are accustomed to term civilisations, is as much a question of geology as of geography. Accadia and Egypt grew great and stained many pages of the record we term history by virtue of the circumstance that the Euphrates and the Nile, after leaving the mountains that gave them birth, flowed respectively through low, level countries which they enriched with precious alluvium. The Orange River was, however, sped oceanwards over a vast plateau of hard-grained rock, several thousand feet above sea-level. Into this the stream has been slowly biting, and the alluvium--that meat upon which material civilisation is nourished, was hurled through the channel and flung wastefully into the maw of the all-consuming waves. Under different physiographical circumstances another Alexandria might have arisen where to-day the flamingo nests among the misty dunes at the Orange River's mouth, "and another Sphinx, of Hottentot or Bantu physiognomy, might have stood, gazing through forgotten centuries, across the waste of Bushmanland." [_Between Sun and Sand_.]

The tract lying within the sickle-bend is called the Richtersveld. Little is known of this tract or of its inhabitants. Half a century ago prospecting for copper ore was carried on in the vicinity. Indications of the metal abounded, but no payable deposit was discovered.

I decided to organise an expedition to the Richtersveld. There were several reasons for doing this. One was a complaint which had been made to the Attorney General of the Cape Colony respecting the alleged flogging of a man under orders of the missionary at Kuboos, which is still haunted by the ghost of an institution established by the London Missionary Society in years long gone by. Another was a reported discovery of gold. This, as a matter of fact was my ostensible excuse for starting at the time I did. Third and last was my own keen desire to explore a little-known tract and make the acquaintance of its human and other inhabitants.

The Richtersveld, according to report, was extremely mountainous and was said to contain only some two hundred people of Koranna-Bushman and Hottentot descent. So remote and isolated was this region that its dwellers were tacitly permitted to govern themselves. They had a "raad" or council of elders which, under presidency of the missionary, settled all disputes and generally administered justice,--informal, but none the less just on that account. The language spoken by the Richtersvelders is an almost extinct Hottentot dialect, full of clicks, gutterals and phonetic excursions impossible to the average European tongue. Only a few of the people had even the merest smattering of Dutch.

That excursion involved more difficulties than any other I had undertaken. There was, it is true, not more than a bare hundred miles of desert to cross, but the only definite information we had been able to gain as to the route was to the effect that it led through a tract practically waterless and extremely difficult to traverse. Moreover, it was reported to be absolutely uninhabited. One thing was quite clear,-- we should have to travel with oxen; horses would have been useless under the conditions as described.

Andries arrived bringing--not the comfortable, tilted, spring-wagon,-- but the strong, heavy, tentless "buck" wagon, with a team of sixteen picked oxen. He seemed uneasy as to our prospects, for the coast desert had a bad reputation and we were about to plunge into a wilderness with the conditions of which he was unfamiliar. The map was produced, but Andries rather despises maps. This one shewed little beyond "gaps" and "unhabitable downs." But it indicated, roughly, our obvious route. We would travel alongside the copper-trolley-line as far as Anenous, which lay at the foot of the mountain range and thus on the inner margin of the coast desert,--which is little, if at all, above the level of the sea. From Anenous we had to trend to the north-west, past Tarabies, Lekkersing and the northern trigonometrical beacon. Thence via Hell Gate to Kuboos, where the wagon would have to remain. Any further journeyings would apparently have to be undertaken on foot. Possibly, however, we might be able to obtain pack-oxen.

Judging by the map, the course looked obvious and easy, but we knew that the surface of the coast desert was composed of deep, soft sand, into which the wheels of the heavy wagon would sink deeply, and that through the sandy tract the northern range of mountains sent out spines or dykes of rock, many miles in length. These, we were told, often took the form of abrupt ridges extremely difficult to negotiate with any vehicle, no matter how strongly built.

The officials of the Cape Copper Company at Anenous (which was the jumping-off place for our hundred-mile sand-swim) knew nothing of the country two miles on either side of the trolley-line. All they were definite about was that no one had ever been known to arrive at Anenous from the northward or north-westward.

Such Hottentots as we were able to consult all declared that it was only under very exceptional circumstances that water was to be found between the trolley-line and the Orange River.

Andries' feelings must have resembled those of a seaman ordered to navigate his ship through an uncharted archipelago. Owing to our absolute lack of local knowledge we should be constrained to do all our travelling by day, and this meant severe suffering for the cattle. In the old days of prospecting for copper ore, all communication with the Richtersveld was effected by a route along the actual sea-shore from Port Nolloth to the Orange River's mouth and thence inland along the river bank to the sickle-bend.

We started from Anenous very early in the morning. On the previous day we had kept the oxen without water, so that almost to the moment of commencing the journey they might be very thirsty, and accordingly drink their fill. We at once plunged into the waste of sand; this proved to be so heavy that we were unable to travel at a higher rate than two miles an hour. The country was quite different from the Bushmanland plains; there was no "toa," but succulent plants of great variety were plentiful. One Mesembryanthemum had the dimensions of a large cabbage. In spite of its succulence the oxen would not eat of this vegetation.

The climate, also, was different from that of the Bushmanland plains; the heat was not so great, but what there was of it proved exhausting. A haze brooded over the earth; through it the north-western mountain range loomed gigantic and mysterious. There were no roads,--unless a wide-meshed network of half-obliterated tracks--probably old game-paths--could be described as such. One strange peculiarity of the coastal desert is the extraordinary persistence of spoor and other markings on the surface of the ground. Near Walfish Bay the clear tracks of elephants may still be seen,--and there has not been an elephant in the vicinity for upwards of half a century.

After desperate efforts we reached Kuboos on the afternoon of the fourth day. I never thought it possible that a wagon could travel where ours