CHAPTER XI 



THE RICHTERSVELD KUBOOS THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD 

 REDIVIVUS GOLD-SEEKING THE RAAD MORBID 

 SENSIBILITY START FOR EL DORADO. 



JUST before the Orange River, wearied 

 from its long travail, slides into the 

 Atlantic, it bends in a sickle-shaped 

 curve. Its course for the previous three hun- 

 dred miles has been through the tremendous 

 and almost inaccessible gorge into whose 

 depths it hurled itself at the Augrabies Falls. 

 The incidence of those aggregates of men 

 which pass, like the individual, through the 

 successive stages of youth, maturity and decay, 

 and which we are accustomed to term civilisa- 

 tions, is as much a question of geology as of 

 geography. Accadia and Egypt grew great 

 and stained many pages of the record we term 

 history by virtue of the circumstance that the 

 Euphrates and the Nile, after leaving the 

 mountains that gave them birth, flowed respec- 

 tively through low, level countries which they 

 enriched with precious alluvium. The Orange 



