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	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