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DIAMOND
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nell wrote of huge kopjes of
rose and amethyst quartz. Then we saw the river, seemingly meandering
in slit ribbons over a wide bed, and then it didn't meander any more
but ran in a deep channel. The pilot pointed ahead wonderingly; at our
height what we saw looked like a mass of smoke from a fire. It was
spray coming off the Aughrabies. We flew around and around the falls,
the pilot and the other veterans as fascinated as I, for it was in full
spate and they had never seen it like that before. A great roaring mass
of deep chocolate-colored water tore along like an express train and
threw itself over the cliff and disappeared in water smoke: it was
amply overflowing its channel. One of our men pointed out that it had
broken through and made itself a new subsidiary falls over to one side,
but there were already so many smaller channels of angry water and so
much outlying activity that I didn't see how he could be sure.
"Some
day. . . mankind will be given an opportunity of seeing what no man
yet can possibly have seen at close quarters and live, the Orange River
in flood, filling not only its self-worn channel, but spreading all
over the lip of that nightmare of an abyss in one appalling maelstrom,"
wrote Cornell.
There
were miles of scorched granite and tumbled rocks, and I had long since
given up trying to spot any sort of living thing, animal or vegetable,
on the landscape. It was the sort of thing I would never have believed
could exist in nature, though Doré often pictured it: pure Death. Then
the Kubos Mountains suddenly dropped off to a plateau, and the plateau
grew less deathlike, and in its turn it dropped off, and then we saw
wide spaces of sand and the sea. The plane turned and
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