ing
of its kind, which is perhaps overfamiliar since Rider Haggard. Cornell
even put in a faithful Hottentot who kept referring to a Winchester
repeating rifle as "the little gun that speaks many times." But the
book is definitely readable and it adds something significant to his
last publication, the memoirs about prospecting. There he repeats a
tale from the Rip Van Winkle and you can see how it took hold
of him: the story of the Bushman's paradise. Or perhaps it was a
Hottentot's paradise, for Cornell seemed willing to accept either
theory. They are not the same sort of person: a Bushman is a primitive
native, a Pygmy who, like the Congo Pygmies, lives after the manner
of the Stone Age, whereas a Hottentot is a member of an
ordinarily statured, yellow-skinned race that has been so much
intermarried with invaders, and so badly defeated, that it has today
practically disappeared. The story that so fascinated Cornell went as
follows: that in a remote and inaccessible spot, inland from the desert
coast along South-West Africa between Walfish (or Walvis) Bay and
Lüderitzbucht, there was an oasis. In that spot, well supplied with
water and cattle and game and all the rest of it, lived a tribe of
Bushmen (or Hottentots) completely cut off from the world. Between the
oasis and the coast was a wide stretch of waterless country. The tribe
had taken refuge there from the Germans who were overlords of the land.
Their children customarily played with diamonds they picked up like
ordinary stones, big rough diamonds the size of walnuts. Their elders
were quite aware of the value of these stones in the world they had
renounced, and were determined that the denizens of that world should
not discover their existence and as a result come in and ruin their
paradise. They were well armed, so the Germans hesitated to attack
them, and
