observing
a number of handsome horses that ran wild on the riverbanks and islands
where there was plenty of vegetation: they were bred, he was told, by a
Boer farmer who lived at the one farm on the river and sold the horses
to German officers. Though all the country at a distance from the river
was desolate, Cornell was refreshed and charmed by the land close to
the water, where grew willows and mimosa thorn and a number of other
trees, as well as smaller plants—a strip of paradise, he said, running
through a desert. The party came upon the old pegs of an almost
forgotten diamond rush, on a flat, sandy stretch of riverbank: the
quest had been quickly abandoned, Cornell reflected, and the place had
probably not been searched as well as it might have been. Cornell was
not the man to give up hope easily, even on behalf of other people, but
he was not on this journey to prospect for diamonds, and he continued
inland, not knowing he had already crossed over land worth millions
of pounds.
Making
their way through country that now grew broken and hilly, they found a
"deserted and dreary expanse of flat, barren land" called the Aries
drift, composed of silt brought from the mountains byüoods, laid down
and built up, and later slashed by deep canyons made by more floods.
Later they crossed much granite debris: here the canyons were full of
boulders of foreign-type rock, and then at last they reached the Kubos
range of mountains, which looked like a great granite wall. At this
point in his reminiscences Cornell indulges in a gentle joke. It was a
barrier "so formidable that a careful inspection . . . made us wonder
whether, instead of a wagon, we ought not to have brought an aeroplane!"
Joking apart, it was strangely depressing. Cornell had never
