“BUSHMAN’S PARADISE.”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19584, 14 September 1925, Page 8

“BUSHMAN’S PARADISE.”

MYSTERIES OF THE VELDT. He came into my office in Capetown thaother day, a lean, sun-dried prospector, tie sat staring out of the window with eyes which seemed to be gazing across many aching miles of yellow veldt (writes Lawrence Green in the London Daily News). 'T have trekked to the Wonder Hole again,’’ he said. “The mining gear I left there years ago still lies rusting at the entrance. No other white man has been there for years.” He pulled out a creased Admiralty chart and showed me the place near the coast, just south of the South-West African border, marked in pencil. “The Wonder Hole is deep,” he went on solemnly; "I could not explore that unknown darkness without a searchlight and a winch with wire cable. But the Bushmen still tell me their queer stories of the place —stories of spirits—and diamonds,' mis eyes glittered. “I believe there is a whole heap of diamonds there.” He was merely relating one of many South. African legends; and if these legends are true, the deserts to the north of the Capa Province, the waterless land of the old Gorman territory, must contain wealth almost incredible. Take, for instance, the story of the mountain of platinum in the Kalahari which a German doctor was just able to gasp before he died in Luderitzbucht after a long thirsty journey 30 years ago. They examined his samples,, genuine enough, and set out on camels with Herero guides to rediscover this fabulous treasure; but the wind had blown coarse desert sand across his tracks, and prospectors who set out on the same quest to-day fail also. Then there is the “Bushman's Paradise” —• a vaet hoard of precious gems—which has lured men for dozens of years into the thirstland of the Namib desert. Hereros and Hottentots of the South-west, dull-witted and lazy though they are, worry every prospector going into the Namib for lea,ve to accompany him. The legend may be a myth, hut the natives believe in it, and usually the natives know. And many have sought the “Bushman’s Paradise,” finding only the whitening skeletons of those who went before in .no burning yellow sand. Of queer discoveries in the desert which are beyond all doubt, I think the ship S anchor half-buried in the mountain above Marienthal must be placed first. Miles from the sea, yet too high to' have been carried up by anything but the sea, lies thie rusty iron anchor. On the haft a faint inscription can be traced. How the anchor came to these barren inland heights—7o miles from the sea—is just a riddle of the veldt. Perhaps whimsical Fate left it there as a tantalising clue to South Africa’s first inhabitants.