The local news was startling, too; diamonds, and prospecting for them, were on everybody’s lips, and rumour was persistent that a large number of stones had been found by the party who had gone north. One of these prospectors, it appeared, had passed through the dorp post-haste on his way back to Cape Town, and had let drop many hints as to the richness of his finds. One man solemnly assured me that, although he had not seen the actual stones, he had been shown a fragment of the rock with the holes in it from which they had been picked, like currants from a bun! “There was the shape of the facets quite plain,” he concluded triumphantly, and there were many other “confirmations” of a like nature. But, absurd as most of these rumours were, there appeared to be too much smoke to be quite without fire, and I determined to try to reach that prospecting party and see what truth there might be in it. But its exact whereabouts was hard to discover till by luck a waggon came in from a distant part of the backveld within a few miles of where this party were working. These waggoners were bastards of a queer breed, German on the father’s side with a Hottentot mother, and their Dutch was worse than my own--which sweeping assertion I make with all due consideration. And as a result we got on very well together, and they agreed to go as soon as they had had their burst out, and got their provisions in. Three days did this, and taking nothing but some food and my sleeping gear, I turned back again with these peculiar mongrels, who were still so full and reeking of bad _dop_ that I was afraid to smoke anywhere near their breath. They were genial kind of savages, however, and once the _dop_ was finished we got on very well together. We had to make a detour by way of their dwelling, a canvas _huis_ similar to friend Abraham’s, but decidedly cleaner, and where I slept cosily on the corn-sacks in the waggon; and three days after leaving the dorp I came up to the prospecting party, in very wild country, at a place called Davedas. I heard them blasting long before I reached them, and extending to them the prospector’s etiquette learnt in an older country, I did not go near their shaft, but sent one of the drivers to say that I should like one of the “baases” to come over to my waggon.