figures
moving about among the woods that might have been gemsbok but could
also have been cattle. In any case the place was certainly an oasis, he
said, and Cornell's heart leaped as he thought of the Bushman's
paradise. But. . . they had no water. It was at least a day and a
half's travel. The Bushmen or Hottentots were armed, perhaps—and anyway
they had no water. They sailed away instead with their sealer.
During
the following years, until the important date of 1914, Cornell went on
a lot of prospecting trips that need not interest us. One does,
however. In 1910 he traveled to Namaqualand, the British territory just
south of German South-West Africa, to the lonely district where the
Orange River emptied into the sea. It is still called by the German
name, Oranjemund, meaning the mouth of the Orange. Cornell was not
aiming for Oranjemund itself, but merely making his way to the
Rich-tersveld territory inland from that spot, enclosed in a wide bend
of the river. In earlier days Richtersveld had been the scene of a
certain amount of copper mining, and Cornell's employers wanted to
know if it was worth recommencing; he was to find the copper if
possible and estimate its potentialities. The nearest settlement to the
region was Port Nolloth, fifty-five miles south of the river mouth, a
desolate place. Cornell spoke feelingly of the fog that spread over the
land early in the morning and the sticky heat that supplanted it when
the sun had driven all moisture away. Leaving Port Nolloth, his party
traveled up to Alexander Bay, and camped there. A short trek brought
them to the Orange. The river mouth was simply a wide expanse of mud
flats interspersed with low islands and haunted by an abundance of wild
fowl. He mentioned flamingos standing in military formation. The men
plodded upriver,
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