simply
let them be. "There were other versions; in fact, no two agreed
exactly," Cornell confesses, "except that the oasis was situated
somewhere between Liideritzbucht, Walfish Bay, the high plateau of the
interior, and the sea, and that the diamonds were as big as they were
abundant."
He
probably heard this story first when he went to Liideritzbucht in
1908. (He says 1907, but the rush wasn't on then, and he probably
remembered wrong.) Until diamonds were found there, South-West Africa
had been an object of desire to only a few people, apart from the
occasional politician. The whole coast running south from Angola, until
it neared Cape Town, was unalluring—sweeps of sand dunes alternating
with rocky outcrops. Down to the Orange River it was German, save for
Walfish Bay, where the British had got a foothold in 1877, during the
race for territory which dissatisfied Rhodes because Britain didn't
grab more. From this coast inland, for distances of a hundred and fifty
miles or more, the land north of the Orange River was German. Then it
was truncated by a straight north-south line that marked the beginning
of the desert, the British Kalahari Game Reserve and, north of that,
the British protectorate of Bechuanaland. Not many people, not even the
land-hungry Boers, felt like disputing the German rights of possession
over the coast. The land was useless for farming; it was all, even in
British territory below the Aughrabies Falls on the Orange, what
Cornell rightly describes as a "terrible desolation of barren, riven
rock." However, for some years before the rush on Lüderitz, rumors had
been coming out of that arid country that there were diamonds somewhere
about. The rumors spoke of sources not only along the coast, where
diamonds were actually found ultimately, but from inland, even from the
