by
a Bushman poisoned arrow. His pockets had been rifled but his wallet
remained, and in the wallet was a map, showing the way to the Bushman's
paradise, and along with that map was one stone the murdering Bushmen
had overlooked; a magnificent rough blue diamond which, sure enough,
was the size of a walnut. Cornell habitually thought of diamonds in
terms of walnuts, though in his more extravagant flights of fancy he
visualized some the size of human heads. Well, the German officer who
found the body and the map, the tale went on, kept his own counsel and
later had a shot at exploring the territory himself in secret. But he
failed to get very far, because he had no water and the intervening
desert was impassable. Naturally, Cornell was fired with ambition to go
in and try to get there where the officer had failed. Unfortunately, he
didn't have the map.
In
the meantime there was still the question of bigger diamonds than
those offered by Lüderitz. If the direction of the prevailing wind and
current was any indication, they might well have been carried along the
sea edge to some place in the south, some one of the many beaches that
lay between Lüderitz and Cape Town. Cornell fell in with a friend who
had a friend of his own, an ex-digger now plying the trade of a sealer
up and down that wild, sun-baked, yet sometimes very cold coast. The
sealer was interesting. He had a ten-ton boat, and he declared that he
knew a beach a hundred and fifty miles south of Lüderitz that certainly
ought to yield diamonds if gravel had any significance at all. It was
the exact same stuff that they had all worked so often at the Vaal
River, and he had mused many a time, looking at it, that it must be
diamondiferous. But he had got himself into trouble with the Lüderitz
officials—
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