Chapter XVIII

TRIP IN SEARCH OF “EMERALD VALLEY”--FEVER AND FAILURE--BACK TO GORDONIA--SECOND TRIP TO BAK RIVER--“SOME GUN!”--THE PACK-COW--SURLY NATIVES--“ROUGHING IT.”

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 Cape Town I found a man awaiting me who claimed to have found a rich deposit of them in Portuguese East Africa, I decided to fill in the time of waiting the Government’s decision as to my desert discoveries by making a dash for “Emerald Valley.”

Rumour as to the existence of this valley has for many years been current amongst prospectors and mining men in the Barberton district, and many a man has heard the tale in Johannesburg. It is alleged that a party of Boers, hunting on the Portuguese side of the Lebombo Mountains, which form the boundary between Portuguese territory and the North-Eastern Transvaal, came upon some ancient workings which they failed to penetrate, owing to noxious gas; but that at the mouth of one they found skeletons, and with the bones a small skin bag full of rough emeralds. They got away with the stones, which fetched a large sum in Europe, but for some unexplained reason were never able to reach the spot again.

My merchant, who had a small rough emerald to help his tale, claimed to have found the spot again, and wanted to make a dash for it from the Transvaal side of the Sabi Game Reserve; but as it was in Portuguese territory, I would only undertake the trip with a proper licence from the Portuguese. As the upshot of negotiations, within a month of leaving the desert I was on my way to Delagoa Bay, accompanied by Telfer, another white miner from Johannesburg, and the “discoverer.” We had been prepared for a certain amount of delay, as all must expect in dealing with Portuguese officials, but it was only after three most exasperating months of expense and waiting that we eventually crossed the Incomati River, a fully equipped expedition, armed with a “Special Mining Licence” and all the necessary permits for carrying out our purpose. And two months later three of us staggered out of the swamps more dead than alive, the fourth, the “discoverer,” having utterly failed us early in the search, and having made his way back into British territory after a terrific carousal, and when he found there would be no more liquor as long as he remained with us.

We had been some months too late, and the rains had caught us in the swamps, whence native women eventually carried out the remnants of our once fine equipment. We were full of fever, bitten nearly to death by the swarms of mosquitoes, and practically penniless; and altogether the trip was one long disaster. Yet, though the man who took us there was a drunkard and utterly unreliable, I still believe that there was some foundation for his tale, and that “Emerald Valley” may yet make the fortune of a better planned and luckier expedition. Telfer, who had had a rough time in the Kalahari, collapsed with fever as soon as we reached Delagoa, and had to remain there. Shadford, my other companion, and I got back to Johannesburg, where he developed blackwater fever, and lay in a hotel for days in a desperate state, whilst I tramped from office to office in an attempt to raise the necessary finances for the opening of a water-route to the Kalahari pans--when once Government had made up its mind to allow of such a thing!

Meanwhile I found a large accumulation of letters awaiting me--several of them months old--and amongst them a number urging me to return to Upington, where several options on supposed diamond properties were now obtainable. More, a wire reporting my return from Portuguese territory elicited the news that a new and reliable guide to “Brydone’s diamonds” had materialised at Upington, and that if I did not secure him pretty quick, others would do so, and “jump” the rich mine near the Bak River, for which I had already had a try (see Chapter XII).

Altogether there were a good many reasons why a rapid return to the vicinity of the Kalahari was desirable, for in spite of the delay in obtaining the fruit of our desert trip, we could not conceive that we should eventually be “turned down” by the Government. Ministers and Secretaries were away stumping or holiday-making, and I could not wait in Johannesburg till their return. I had obtained the promise of the requisite finances for the water-route when the time came; meanwhile, however, it would be better not to neglect new opportunities, and, thanks to the help of certain staunch friends, I was soon on my way once more to the region of sand and t’samma.

This was on November 1st, 1913. Ever since early in June I had been living a life of constant worry, anxiety, and hardship which had made me look back with regret to those lonely dunes of the Kalahari, where at least there were no crocodiles, few mosquitoes, and less fever, and where the absence of water seemed rather an advantage when fresh from the sodden, steaming marshes of the Incomati and Lebombo.

Telfer was still down with fever at Delagoa Bay, and Shadford, a wreck of the strong man he had been, in a like case in Johannesburg, whilst even I, fever-salted as I had considered myself, had turned yellow to the whites of my eyes, shook periodically with fits of ague that threatened to lose me all the teeth the t’samma had left, and had to live principally on quinine. A week later I was back in Gordonia, where the dry air and glorious sunshine of the finest climate in the world soon drove away the effect of the “emerald picnic.”

At Upington I found that the “guide” who claimed to know the way to the cave and hollow mountain of Brydone’s story near the Bak River was a certain trooper in the C.M.P. named Trollip, a gigantic chap of about 6 ft. 3 ins., who had been through the country in question at the latter end of the Hottentot rebellion. Trekking back from German territory, he had passed through a celebrated gorge known as “Oorlogs Kloof” (Battle Kloof), and thence through the wild hills I have described in Chapter XII, and a Hottentot guide had pointed out a certain mountain as being the place “where the diamonds were.”

This was by no means the precise information I had been led to expect from the wires and letters I had received; still, I was convinced that I had been hot upon the trail on my previous trip, and jumped at the chance of following up this additional clue.

The native who had showed Trollip the spot could not be found, though we rode over half Gordonia looking for him, but a Bastard who had been also one of the party with Trollip in the mountains was induced to accompany us; and, the police trooper himself having obtained leave of absence, on November 22nd I again set out for the Great Falls and the German Border.

In addition to Trollip and the Bastard (Carl van Rooy by name), I had with me a young half-breed Hottentot named Gert, who had been with me in the Kalahari, and a friend from Upington named Ford-Smith, who wanted to see the Falls, try a new-fangled American repeating shot-gun, which acted like a pump and was almost as elegant, and incidentally bring back a few diamonds himself.

By a variety of conveyances, horses, Cape cart, ox-cart, etc., we got to the Great Falls, which I looked at with more interest than ever since I had heard that the Union Government intended utilising their enormous power in the near future. We stayed a day near the Great Cataract, partly to further explore its terrific gorges, and partly because our horses had got away in the night and gone into the mountains to look for grass, and whilst waiting for them, Carl, the guide, gave us an exhibition of fancy shooting which I would not have missed for anything. He first of all asked me if I had Martini cartridges, which I had. He then produced from the bottom of the cart the weirdest weapon I have ever seen, which is saying a good deal; for in this wild part of South Africa it is no uncommon thing to find rifles and guns of ancient make that, having been broken and patched and cobbled with raw hide, nails, tacks, wire, and solder, in the most extraordinary manner, are yet capable of doing excellent work in the hands of their owners, who know their little peculiarities.

But van Rooy’s was the limit! It had been a Martini, one of the old, long, straight-stocked ones, that kick like a mule; but one day it had fallen off a waggon and a wheel had passed over it, breaking the stock and bending the barrel almost double. Thrown away as beyond repair, it had been rescued by Carl, who had long coveted a rifle (as every man on the Border does), and who had determined to repair it. The stock he had carved from an old ox-yoke, and the barrel was fastened to it with a combination of all the home-made devices mentioned above; but the crowning feat had been the straightening of the barrel, which he had accomplished by making it red-hot and hammering it.

The result was startling, for not only was it battered and dented badly by the hammer, but the foresight was a good eighth of an inch out of alignment with the back; in fact it curved to such an extent that it suggested an attempt at a weapon designed to shoot round corners.

I could not conceive that anyone would have the temerity to try and shoot with it, but Carl was immediately on his dignity when I said so, and wanted to know what was the matter with his gun. He said, moreover, that the hills were full of _tijgers_, and unless he could have cartridges for that gun he wouldn’t go a step farther; moreover he wanted some practice, as he had rarely tried the gun since he “straightened” it.

It appeared like aiding and abetting suicide, but at last I gave him them, and we scattered for cover, whilst he lay down and let her go. There was a most terrific bang, and I wondered what the coroner would say, but Carl was still there, though at least three yards back from where he had first fired, rubbing his shoulder thoughtfully. But he was no funk, and with half a dozen shots had found out what allowance to make for the kink, and could hit a bottle at a hundred yards. And Ford-Smith, himself a “weapon fancier,” and usually festooned with all sorts of weird shooting-irons, thereupon recognised him as a kindred spirit, and was soon swapping shooting yarns with this valiant gunner. He told Smith, if I remember rightly, that at a hundred yards he had to aim two yards to the right and two feet below the object, and I wondered how he would figure it out if a leopard charged him from a quarter that distance!

Next day, at Wag Brand, we had again to abandon our carts, packing sheer necessities upon two of the horses, and carrying a heavy load ourselves as we pushed forward along the pathless and precipitous slopes of the gorge, through which ran the Orange, and scarcely expecting to get the horses through. Within a few hundred yards of the start we had already come to grief, though luckily the accident was more ludicrous than serious.

For in negotiating a granite shoulder smoothly sloping into the water, the old white horse that was leading missed his footing, scrambled wildly as though on skates, reared up and fell with a terrible splash into the muddy water. His pack had been roped on with a long coil of Manila, and in his frantic struggles this came loose and he was soon tangled up like a fish in a net, and it looked like losing both him and our precious pack. I jumped in with a knife and slashed his pack away, and we got both out farther down. And then we stood and laughed till the baboons came out on the rocky peaks and hooted us, for the poor old horse was the most ridiculous-looking object imaginable. He had been white before he fell in, now he looked like an equine rainbow.

Part of his multitudinous load had been a bag of yellow sugar from Upington. I do not pretend to know what it was dyed with, or why it should have been dyed at all, but all one side of him was a deep mustard yellow; a box of permanganate of potash crystals had tinted most of the rest of him from rose pink to deep purple; and a ball of washing-blue, which the only fastidious member of the party had brought, to be able to wash his shirts a nice colour, had completed the picture.

Of course a good deal of our scanty stores were utterly spoiled, and it meant short commons for the trip, but we were lucky to have saved anything, and were thankful for small mercies.

With great caution we successfully negotiated the rest of the bad places, and came to the mouth of the Molopo, whence the going was easy. Lower down, by a lovely stretch of placid water, and opposite the huge red mountain known as “Zee-coe-stuk,” we found a number of Hottentots and _Beeste Damaras_ with sheep, goats, and cattle, which Trollip shrewdly suspected had been stolen, for the few natives amongst these wild hills are vagrants and thieves, mostly descendants of the old free-booters who made this part of the Orange their fastness during the last century, or fugitives from justice. They were surly and suspicious, and would undoubtedly have liked to plunder the lot of us, but we were all well armed, and when they saw the quick-firing section and heavy artillery of Smith and Carl, they became quite civil. From them we succeeded in hiring a pack-cow, which lightened our load considerably, the old dear trotting along ahead of us in the most willing manner, climbing like a cat over rocks and stones, and with a half-grown calf running behind her.

Showing washing-machine, sieves, stores, etc. Note the canvas water-bag.]

The rotary washing-machine is in the background.]

A day later we were in the deep gorge of the Bak River, where we succeeded in getting both horses and cow to our old camping-place of