The Hard Journey to the Diamond Fields

Day after day, as the diamond-seekers from Cape Town plodded on with their creaking wagons, the same purpled brown face was out spread before them of the stunted flowering shrub which has given its name to the desert, spotted with patches of sun-cracked clay or hot red sand.

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

When the rain fell in torrents, with the lurid flashes and nerve-shaking crash of South African thunderstorms, the diamond-seekers huddled under the stifling cover of their wagons, while fierce gusts shook and strained every strip of canvas, and water-drops spurted through every crevice. In fair weather some were glad to spread their blankets on the ground near the wagon, and stretch their limbs, cramped by their packing like sardines in a box. On the plains they had no fuel for cooking except what they could gather of dry bullock’s dung. Sometimes no headway could be made against the blinding dust storms, that made even the tough African cattle turn tail to the blasts, and clogged the eyes and ears and every pore of exposed skin with irritating grit and powder. Sometimes the rain fell so fast that the river-beds were filled in a few hours with muddy torrents, which blocked any passage by fording for days and even weeks at a time, and kept the impatient diamond-seekers fuming in vain on their banks. Payton’s party was forty-six days in its passage from Port Elizabeth to the diamond-fields without meeting with any serious delays, and journeys lasting two months were not uncommon.

Still, in spite of all obstacles, privations, and discomforts, the long journey to the fields was not wholly monotonous and unpleasant. As there was no beaten way, the prospectors chose their own path, riding by day and camping at night as their fancy led them. In ascending to the table-land of the interior from Natal, there were shifting and stirring visions of mountain peaks, terraces, gorges, and valleys. Throughout the Orange Free State, but especially in the neighborhood of the valleys of the Orange and Vaal, volcanic-rock elevations are common, sometimes massed in irregular rows and often rising in the most jagged and fantastic shapes. “When we see them at the surface,” wrote the geologist Wyley in 1856,

they look like walls running across the country, or more frequently from a narrow, stony ridge like a wall that has been thrown down. The rock of which they are composed, green stone or basalt, is known by the local name of iron-stone, from its great hardness and toughness and from its great weight. The origin of these dikes is well known. They have been produced by volcanic agency, which, acting from below upon horizontal beds of stratified rock, has cracked and fissured them at right angles to their planes of stratification, and these vertical cracks have been filled up with the melted rock or lava from below. The perpendicular fissures through which it has found its way upward are seldom seen, nor should we expect to see much of them, for along the line of these the rocks have been most broken up and shattered and the denudation has been greatest.”

Even in traversing the karroos there were curious and awe some sights to attract and impress the mind of a traveler be holding for the first time these desert wastes so widely spread over the face of South Africa. They differ little in appearance except in size. The Great or Central Karroo, which lies beneath the foothills of the Zwarte Bergen range, has a sweep to the north of more than three hundred miles in a rolling plateau ranging in elevation from two to three thousand feet. Day after day, as the diamond-seekers from Cape Town plodded on with their creaking wagons, the same purpled brown face was out spread before them of the stunted flowering shrub which has given its name to the desert, spotted with patches of sun-cracked clay or hot red sand. To some of the Scotchmen this scrub had the cheery face of the heather of their own Highlands, and home sick Englishmen would ramble far through the furze to pick the bright yellow flowers of plants that recalled the gorse of their island homes. These common bushes, rarely a foot in height, and the thick, stunted camel-thorn were almost the only vegetable coating of the desert.

Straggling over this plain ran the quaint ranges of flat-topped hummocks and pointed spitz-kopjes, streaked with ragged ravines torn by the floods, but utterly parched for most of the year. Shy meerkats (Cynictis penicillata), weasel-like creatures with furry coats, peered cautiously from their burrows at the strange procession of fortune-hunters, and from myriads of the mammoth ant-hills that dot the face of the desert innumerable legions of ants swarmed on the sand along the track of the wagons. Sometimes at nightfall the queer aardvark lurked upon the ant heap and licked up the crawling insects by thousands. Far over the heads of the travelers soared the predatory eagles and swooping hawks, harrying the pigeons and dwarf doves that clustered at daybreak to drink at the edge of every stagnant pool.

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