SOUTH ATTIICAN FLOODS. 335 



although generally but dry vater channels. The periodical i una falling in 

 the mountains near its sources, between September and March, also swell 

 the Orange River to a great extent, ard large portions of land along its 

 banks are then inundated." 



In an official report which I made to the Government of the Colony in 

 1864, it is stated : — " I have seen the Tarka, the Fish River, the Keiskam- 

 ma, and the Buffalo in their might. I have crossed the bed of the first- 

 mentioned in a box suspended from a rope stretching iroiA trees on the 

 opposite banks, while the river torrent was tearing along below, twenty-two 

 feet deep, as ascertained by measurement, where forty-eight hours before the 

 depth was only eighteen inches. I have been told by a gentleman who had 

 given special attention to the subject, of the mean rise of a number of rivers 

 in the same district being twenty-eight feet ; I have been told by the same 

 gentleman of a maximum rise of sixty feet ; and I have gone over the 

 scene of devastation occasioned by the sudden rise of a river to a height of 

 seventy feet above its usual level." 



The case referred to occurred in the vicinity of Hankey, on the Gamptoos 

 river and its affluent, the Klein Riviere, on the 1st of October, 1867 ; and ' 

 by the inundation thereby occasioned the promising village of that name, 

 one of the mo^t promising of the institutions for the conversion and civili- 

 zation of the natives of South Africa, was reduced to a heap of ruins. It 

 was the residence of a people remarkable for then' misfortunes and for their 

 enterprise. In 1830 they formed a water-course several miles in length 

 over a very difficult country, for the purpose of leading out a small river 

 upon their garden ground. The work was twice completed and twice de- 

 stroyed by floods. A few years before the occurrence of this inundation a 

 still bolder scheme was projected and carried out with complete success by 

 the niissionary, William Philip. Thi« was the excavation of a tuntiel through 

 a hard sandstone ridge which separated a reach of the Gamptoos river itself 

 from a considerable extent of excellent ground near them, half surrounded 

 by one of its bends, through which a copious stream, with a fall sufficient „o 

 work machinery, as well as to irrigate the soil, had just begun to flow when 

 their friend and guide was snatched from them in the prime of his life and 

 usefulness. 



This tunnel I have visited — I know of no work of the kind in the 

 colony except itself; and I have learned that it subsequently received a 

 corresponding extension by the brother of the projector, the missionary 

 now in charge of the station, who, with the men on the station as workmen, 

 has carried the surplus supply from the tunnel under the river at a lower 

 point, and brought it up on the further side to irrigate lands lying below 

 the level whence the waters are obtained, but co i-jiderably above the level 

 of the river there. In accordance with the energy manifested by this 

 people in tbe execution of such works, and with like perseverance, they had 

 continued to devote all the time and labou..' they could spare frofn the 

 occupations by which they support their families to public improvments, to 

 buildings, and to the extension of cultivation in the shape of gardens and 

 cornfields, when this terrible flood again devastated their lands, destroyed 

 their dwellings, and I may say decimated their numbers. 



The valley inundated, more than three-fourths of which are the grounds 

 of the Institution, is somewhat tortuous, bearing some resemblance in shape 

 to a letter S with the body disproportionately expanded, between four and 

 five miles in length, with an average breadth of above a mile. At its lower 



