diamonds
out of that town. Nobody takes furniture out; the furniture in
Oranjemund is all company property and stays there, so there isn't much
chance to bring out gem stones in the overstuffed sofa. Evidently some
people have tried, one way or another.
"We don't have smuggling trouble here," said one of the officials to me. "That is, never with natives." He did not elaborate.
Once
you have got over the first impression that it is all the same, you see
many kinds of landscape in the dune country, and all spacious. There
are stretches of sand and nothing but sand, where scoops are at work or
a bevy of fast-moving, jiggling, noisy Le Toumeau machines working
away toward the same end. (I remember the Le Tourneaus especially
because one of the engineers showed me a small screw that came out of
one of them—just a stubby little screw—and told me it costs three
dollars to replace, counting transport and tax.) Then there are the
flayed ribs of hard rock. There is the township itself, with neat
roofs and club and the valiant green of a few plots of grass, and the
hospital garden where tortoises swarm and lay eggs in sandy spots and
forget about them. The houses and the farm have a temporary look in
spite of their solidity and the hard gravel roads between them, like
bathhouses on a beach. There is too much sand; they are too easily
hidden by the dunes, flat though these seem. A few minutes' drive
toward the screening and washing plant, for instance, and they have
disappeared.
To
look quite right a desert should have camels on it, and as a matter of
fact this one used to. The Germans patrolled on camels, and the first
prospectors used them because they were
