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CHAPTER NINE
Paradise—Limited
Lieutenant Fred C. Cornell, O.B.E., had to rewrite his book, The Glamour of Prospecting, because he didn't ready it for publication until just after World War I. He had a lot of nasty things he had long wanted to say about the Germans, but in his first, prewar draft he had held back; his interests would undoubtedly have suffered if he expressed himself frankly. Cor­nell's work often took him into South-West Africa, and before the war that territory, of course, was German. He was a pros­pector. He worked mainly in the Cape Colony, South-West Africa, and environs, and he was indefatigable. A good pros­pector should always have a streak of romanticism running through his practical nature, but in Cornell this streak seems to have been as wide as Park Avenue. He would hear vague rumors of a discovery hundreds of miles away, and off he would pelt. In this he was probably not as rash as he would seem to­day, for in the early part of our century there wasn't much future in caution, not in his line. The papers were slow to hear of and report discoveries, and there were no fast trains, no roads for cars, and certainly no commercial airlines by which a man