so
well fitted to the climate; they were brought specially from North
Africa, but they have long since been supplanted. There are still
horses running wild near the farm at Oranjemund, but they are really
wild now; the fanner who bred them and the Germans who bought them are
gone. Out of sight of the horses or the town, it is as if all human
endeavor on that coast had never been; it seems as quiet and lifeless
as Cornell thought it when he landed on the sealer's beach higher up. I
didn't even see a jackal. Most melodramatic of all Oranjemund
landscapes, however, is that around the washing plant. In other
surroundings the plant would probably be just another group of houses
full of machinery, roaring away. Here, its roar seems small stuff
compared with the wind and the waves, but it looks heroic. It is
located at the edge of the sea, and below the sand cliffs the Atlantic
pounds the beach for mile on mile of sandy waste. In the brass sunlight
it looked wonderfully green and cool the day I saw it.
"Cool
is right," said the man who was showing us around. "It's the coldest
water in the world, I sometimes think—too cold to swim in at any rate,
no matter how hot the air is. The Atlantic's always a cold sea. Pity.
But then the current would be too strong anyway."
Back
of us the plant was crashing and banging and sending out an endless
beltful of washed sand and gravel, shooting it over the edge of the
cliff, building up a mountain as it worked. The sea below kept eating
away at this mountain, undermining it, receiving tons of it in great
splashes, carrying it off, spreading it again on the beach farther
down, and there was always more piling up on top; it was a struggle
that never ended. Inside the buildings the gravel was being sieved and
washed and
