Diamond Mines: The Discovery Page 171



	132 THE DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA tures with furry coats, peered cautiously from their burrows at the strange procession of fortune-hunters, and from myriads of the mammoth ant-hills that dot the face of the desert innumerable legions of ants swarmed on the sand along the track of the wagons. Sometimes at nightfall the queer aard-vark lurked upon the ant-heap and licked up the crawling insects by thousands. Far over the heads of the travellers soared the predatory eagles and swooping hawks, harrying the pigeons and dwarf doves that clustered at daybreak to drink at the edge of every stagnant pool.¹ Even in the earliest years of the Dutch advance into South Africa, when wild beasts browsed in troops on every grassy plain and valley and the poorest marksman could kill game almost at will, the karroo was shunned by almost every living creature except in the fickle season of rainfall. The lion skirted the desert edge warily, unwilling to venture far from a certain water-brook or pool. There was nothing on the bare karroo to tempt the rhinoceros from his bed in green-leaved thickets, and only the wide-roaming antelopes (trekbok) rambled for pasturage far over the sparsely coated and parched desert waste. If this was true in the days when the tip of Africa was swarming with animal life, it is not surprising that the diamond seekers in 1869 and 1870 rarely saw any living mark for their rifles when they journeyed over the desert. Rock-rabbits, akin to the scriptural coney, scampering to their holes, were often the largest game in sight for days at a time, and it was counted remarkable luck when any hunter put a bullet through a little brown antelope, a grysbok, or springbok.² The springboks still haunted the Great Karroo, for they were particularly fond of its stunted bush growth, and in the rainy season many droves of these antelopes could be seen browsing warily or flying in panic from the spring of the cheetah, the African hunting leopard; but most of the bigger game, blesbok, hartebeest, koodoo, and wildebeest, that used to feed ¹ "A Breath from the Veld," John Guille Millais, London, 1895. "Among the Diamonds," 1870-1871. ² "The Diamond Diggings of South Africa," Payton, 1872.