Sights Along the Way to the Diamond Fields

When the prospectors crossed the karroo and entered the stretches of pasture-land which the Dutch called “veld”, the scenes of their marches were much livelier and cheerier.

Continuing Diamonds Discovered in South Africa,
our selection from The Diamond Mines of South Africa by Gardner F. Williams published in 1902. The selection is presented in eight easy 5-minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Diamonds Discovered in South Africa.

Time: 1867
Place: Orange River, South Africa

Even in the earliest years of the Dutch advance into South Africa, when wild beasts browsed in troops on every grassy plain and valley, and the poorest marksman could kill game almost at will, the karroo was shunned by almost every living creature except in the fickle season of rainfall. The lion skirted the desert edge warily, unwilling to venture far from a certain water-brook or pool. There was nothing on the bare karroo to tempt the rhinoceros from his bed in green-leaved thickets, and only the wild-roaming antelopes (trekbok) rambled for pasturage far over the sparsely coated and parched desert waste. If this was true in the days when the tip of Africa was swarming with animal life, it is not surprising that the diamond-seekers in 1869 and 1870 rarely saw any living mark for their rifles when they journeyed over the desert. Rock-rabbits, akin to the scriptural coney, scampering to their holes, were often the largest game in sight for days at a time, and it was counted remarkable luck when any hunter put a bullet through a little brown antelope, a grysbok or springbok. The springboks still haunted the Great Karroo, for they were particularly fond of its stunted bush-growth, and in the rainy season many droves of these antelopes could be seen browsing warily or flying in panic from the spring of the cheetah, the African hunting leopard ; but most of the bigger game, blesbok, hartebeest, koodoo, and wildebeest, that used to feed greedily on the same pasture, had been killed or driven away by the keen hunting of the years that followed the taking of the Cape by the English.

Sometimes the clear sky of the horizon was blurred by the advancing of monstrous swarms of locusts, the “black snow storms” of the natives, sweeping over the face of the land like the scourge of devouring flames, chased by myriads of locust birds, and coating the ground for miles around at nightfall with a crawling, heaving coverlet. Then might be heard the hoarse trump of the cranes winging their way over the desert and drop ping on the field strewn with locusts to gorge on their insect prey. Or the travelers saw the slate-white secretary bird, stalking about with his self-satisfied strut and scraping up mouthfuls with his eagle-like bill.

More marvelous than the locust clouds were the amazing mirages that deceived even the keen-eyed ostriches with their counterfeit lakes and wood-fringed streams, so temptingly near, but so provokingly receding, like the fruits hanging over Tantalus. Sometimes hilltops were reared high above the horizon, distorted to mountainous size and melting suddenly in thin air or a flying blur. Now a solitary horseman was seen to swoop over the desert in the form of a mammoth bird, or a troop of antelopes were changed to charging cavalry. No trick of illusion and transformation was beyond the conjuring power of the flickering atmosphere charged with the radiating heat of the desert.

When the prospectors crossed the karroo and entered the stretches of pasture-land which the Dutch called “veld”, the scenes of their marches were much more lively and cheery. Little farm houses dotted the plains and valleys, rude cottages of clay-plastered stones or rough timbers, but hospitable with fires blazing on open hearths, big iron pots hanging from cranes and simmering with stews ; and broad-faced, beaming vrouws and clusters of chunky boys and girls greeted the arrival of an ox-wagon from the coast as a welcome splash in the stagnant stream of their daily life.

At some of the halting-places on the banks of streams, or where plentiful water was stored in natural pans or artificial ponds, the extraordinary fertility of the irrigated soil of South Africa was plainly to be seen in luxuriant gardens, with brilliant flower-beds and heavy-laden fruit trees and vines. Here figs, pomegranates, oranges, lemons, and grapes ripened side by side, and hung more tempting than apples of Eden in the sight of the thirsting, sunburnt, dust-choked men who had plodded so far over the parched karroos. They stretched their cramped legs and aching backs in the grateful shade of spreading branches, and watched with half-shut eyes the white flocks nibbling on the pasture-land, and the black and red cattle scattered as far as the eye could see over the veld. Tame ostriches stalked fearlessly about them, often clustering like hens at the door of the farm house to pick up a mess of grain or meal, apparently heedless of any approach, but always alert and likely to resent familiarity from a stranger with a kick as sharp and staggering as any dealt by a mule’s hind leg.

The interior of the homes in these oases was not so inviting, for the rooms, at best, were small and bare to the eye of a towns man. But some were comparatively neatly kept, with smoothly cemented floors, cupboards of quaintly figured china and earthen-ware, hangings and rugs of leopard, fox, jackal, and antelope skins, and brackets of curving horns loaded with hunting-arms and garnished with ostrich-feathers. For the guests there was probably the offer of a freshly killed antelope or sheep but the farmer’s family was often content with “biltong,” the dried meat that hung in strips or was piled in stacks under his curing-shed.

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