h of the railway, which runs mostly from west to east,
the aspect of the country is much the same, dry, stony, and forbidding,
for full three hundred miles to the Orange River, and beyond that into
Namaqualand. Except for the few houses at some of the stations, it seems
a wilderness; yet here and there stand tiny villages, connected by lines
of coach with the railway, whither the neighbouring farmers come to
supply their household needs. But as the train moves farther and farther
eastward the features of nature grow less austere. The mountains by
degrees recede or sink; the country becomes more of an open plain,
though with isolated hills visible here and there over its expanse. It
is also slightly greener, and after the rains some little grass springs
up, besides the low, succulent shrub which the sheep eat. At De Aar
Junction, five hundred miles from Cape Town, the line to Bloemfontein
and the Transvaal branches off to the right. We follow the western
branch over a vast slightly undulating plain to the Orange River, here a
perennial stream, and at six hundred and forty-six miles from Cape Town
find ourselves once more in the haunts of men at Kimberley.

Kimberley, the city of diamonds, has had a curious history. In 1869-70
the precious crystals, first found in 1867 near the Orange River, were
discovered here in considerable quantity. A sudden rush of adventurers
from all parts of South Africa, as well as from Europe, gave it in three
or four years a population of many thousands. The mining claims were
then and for some years afterwards in the hands of a large number of
persons and companies who had opened them or purchased them. The
competition of these independent miner-workers was bringing down the
price of the stones, and the waste or leakage arising from the theft of
stones by the native work-people, who sold them to European I.D.B.
(illicit diamond-buyers), seriously reduced the profits of mining. It
was soon seen that the consolidation of the various concerns would
effect enormous savings and form the only means of keeping up the price
of diamonds. The process of amalgamating the claims and interests and
merging them in one huge corporation was completed in 1885, chiefly by
the skill and boldness of Mr. Cecil J. Rhodes, who had gone to Natal for
his health shortly before 1870, and came up to Kimberley in the first
months of the rush. Since the amalgamation, the great corporation called
the De Beers Consolidated M