The Kimberley Waterworks, which I also visited, have proved a great boon
to this part, of the Colony. They were erected at a cost of L400,000,
the water supply being obtained from the Vaal River, seventeen miles
away.
After spending a most pleasant and agreeable week there, I left
Kimberley at six o'clock on the morning of June 7, in a wagon drawn by
eight horses, and accompanied by five friends, for Warrenton, _en route_
for Bechuanaland and the Transvaal. This mode of travelling was quite a
novelty to me. Although in this journey of altogether three weeks'
duration, we occasionally put up at one or two hotels, at some of the
towns, and sometimes at the farmhouses on our way, we frequently "camped
out" on the open veldt, and, after finishing our evening meal of the
rough-and-ready provisions we carried with us, supplemented by the game
we shot, we wrapped ourselves in our karosses, and slept for the night
under the canopy of the starlit sky. I occupied the wagon, my more
juvenile companions lying on the ground beneath it.
This was my first experience of sleeping in the open air in a wagon, and
this, too, in the depth of a South African winter.
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