Diamond Mines: The Discovery Page 169



	130 THE DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA their own path, riding by day and camping at night as their fancy led them. In ascending to the tableland of the interior from Natal, there were shifting and stirring visions of mountain peaks, terraces, gorges, and valleys. On the higher terraces there was not the luxuriance of the coast, — the huge tree ferns with feathery fronds, the towering masses of palms, the drooping festoons of climbing vines, the exquisite flowers : spiked ansellias with their pale yellow blossoms, barred and spotted with red, pure white, sweet-scented clusters of mystacidium, and orchids of marvellous variety and hue, — but even the highest upland tree growth had beauties of its own. On the slopes of the Drakensberg the wild chestnut, the Natal mahogany, the white pear and iron wood grow sturdily, and the common yellow wood, stink wood, bogabog, and sneeze wood flourish in spite of their rude names.¹ Amid this varied scenery they could linger and wind about as they pleased, and every turn of their path revealed new charms of line and color. As they descended the mountain flanks some marked how the lacustrine deposits of past ages had overspread the face of the land with their covering of sandstone and shale, even skirting the summits of the highest peaks at a height of more than six thousand feet, as was plainly shown on the Com-passberg.² On the plateau below they saw how the craggy hills, pointed spitz-kopjes, and columnar ridges of the trappean rocks projected above the sedimentary cover of the karroo. Throughout the Orange Free State, but especially in the neighborhood of the valleys of the Orange and Vaal, these volcanic rock elevations are common, sometimes massed in irregular rows and often rising in the most jagged and fantastic shapes. " When we see them at the surface," wrote the geologist Wyley in 1856, "they look like walls running across the country, or more frequently form a narrow, stony ridge like a wall that has been thrown down. The rock of which they are composed, greenstone or basalt, is known by the local name of iron stone, ¹ "The Colony of Natal," J. Forsyth Ingram. ² "Among the Diamonds," 1870-1871.