The glamour of prospecting

SECOND TRIP TO RICHTERSFELDT--SMASH-UP IN HELL’S KLOOF--CHRISTMAS AT KUBOOS--TESTING THE “BANKET”--A NEAR THING IN THE RAPIDS--AFTER A LEOPARD--NEW TRAILS--HOTTENTOT SUPERSTITIO...

PERMIT FOR THE FORBIDDEN GAME RESERVE--VAN REENEN AND THE SCORPION--SECOND VISIT TO THE GREAT FALLS--OLD GERT, OUR GUIDE--BUSHMAN ARROWS AND THEIR POISONS--BUSHMAN INOCULATION A...

What gave me “diamond fever” I don’t pretend to say. Certainly I have no love for the cut and finished article, and nothing would induce me to wear it; but for the rough stone,...

At that time rumour was rife that, somewhere in the terrible wilderness of sand-dunes stretching north-east of Luderitzbucht, there existed an oasis where not only water was ple...

Meanwhile a local acquaintance of Jim’s asked Du Toit and me to go with him a day’s journey up the Khuisiep River, to a place in the Namieb Desert, where he believed that tin ex...

In Cape Town I found rumours of new diamond deposits were as rife as they had been in German territory, and had scarcely rubbed the Luderitzbucht sand from my eyes before I was...

In Cape Town I heard that the prospecting craze had reached Port Nolloth, that the whole of the beach there had been pegged, and that parties of prospectors had spread northward...

On the third day we reached Zwartmodder, a tiny police post and store in the old dry bed of the Molopo, whose course we were now to follow for some days. The two policemen (C.M....

Whilst discussing ways and means for investigating the fascinating regions I have just described, something occurred to set my thoughts entirely in another direction. This was n...

The fourth day found us at Springklip, a solitary hill near the mountain range, where, between two outlying granite peaks, a few waggons, and here and there a mat hut, marked th...

Here, if water allowed, we intended making a permanent central camp from which to start our real business of prospecting, but the question--and the question above all others in...

Zendling’s (Missionary’s) Drift received its name from the fact that the first missionaries to enter Damaraland crossed the Orange at this spot. There is no kind of settlement o...

A month later I was again back in Port Nolloth, accompanied by Ransson and L. Poulley, a Rhodesian to whose imagination the huge beds of conglomerate we had seen appealed very s...

In Cape Town I found a most encouraging budget of news awaiting me from my energetic friend in Upington. Ever since my return from Rietfontein through that unsophisticated villa...

It was obvious, however, that such a permit would take a lot of time and patience to procure, and at any rate would be of no use until the long drought broke.

PERMIT FOR THE FORBIDDEN GAME RESERVE--VAN REENEN AND THE SCORPION--SECOND VISIT TO THE GREAT FALLS--OLD GERT, OUR GUIDE--BUSHMAN ARROWS AND THEIR POISONS--BUSHMAN INOCULATION A...

grass and water were even scarcer than on that occasion, everything was exactly the same--the infrequent “homesteads,” naturally somewhat dirtier and more dilapidated, and the a...

The long, parallel, wave-like formation of the sand-dunes of the Kalahari has been explained by many scientists as the result of the action of the prevailing wind, but this theo...

The old bed of the Molopo River, which farther south has been long since denuded of timber, is, in the vicinity of its junction with the Kuruman, both well wooded and interestin...

One of our greatest disappointments in the Kalahari had been our failure to reach the pan of “bright green stones,” which we believed to be emeralds, and when on my return to Ca...

since last I had been there with Paul and Borcherds, though higher up, where the German patrol-path crossed into our territory, there were signs that these gentlemen visited thi...

At Upington I took the preliminary steps for obtaining the right to prospect the lands to which the indications on the border had pointed, a task which proved both long and tedi...

We left Upington on Thursday, July 30th, 1914. The bi-weekly post had just arrived, and papers from the outside world brought the news of the ominous war-cloud gathering in Euro...