East London, the nearest port, was more than four hundred miles from the diamond-field, and Cape Town nearly seven hundred. Durber, Port Alfred, and Port Elizabeth were almost equally distant, as the crow flies) approximately four hundred fifty miles; but the length of the journey to the Vaal could not be measured by any bare comparison of air-line distances. The roads, at best, were rough trampled tracks, changing after a rainfall to beds of mire. Their tortuous courses rambled from settlement to settlement, or from one farmhouse to another, over the veld, and often were wholly lost in the shifting sands of the karroo. It was a tedious and difficult journey by land even from one seacoast town to another, and fifty miles from the coast the traveller was fortunate if his way was marked by even a cattle-path.
When the rain fell in torrents, with the lurid flashes and nerve-shaking crash of South African thunderstorms, the diamond-seekers huddled under the stifling cover of their wagons, while fierce gusts shook and strained every strip of canvas, and water-drops spurted through every crevice. In fair weather some were glad to spread their blankets on the ground near the wagon, and stretch their limbs, cramped by their packing like sardines in a box. On the plains they had no fuel for cooking except what they could gather of dry bullock's dung. Sometimes no headway could be made against the blinding duststorms, that made even the tough African cattle turn tail to the blasts, and clogged the eyes and cars and every pore of exposed skin with irritating grit and powder. Sometimes the rain fell so fast that the river-beds were filled in a few hours with muddy torrents, which blocked any passage by fording for days and even weeks at a time and kept the impatient diamond-seekers fuming in vain on their banks. Payton's party was forty-six days in its passage from Port Elizabeth to the diamond-fields without meeting with any serious delays, and journeys lasting two months were not uncommon.
Still, in spite of all obstacles, privations, and discomforts, the long journey to the fields was not wholly monotonous and unpleasant. As there was no beaten way, the prospectors chose their own path, riding by day and camping at night as their fancy led them. In ascending to the table-land of the interior from Natal, there were shifting and stirring visions of mountainpeaks, terraces, gorges, and valleys.
Throughout the Orange Free State, but especially in the neighborhood of the valleys of the Orange and Vaal, volcanic-rock elevations are common, sometimes massed in irregular rows and often rising in the most jagged and fantastic shapes. "When we see them at the surface," wrote the geologist Wyley in 1856, "they look like walls running across the country, or more frequently from a narrow, stony ridge like a wall that has been thrown down. The rock of which they are composed, greenstone or basalt, is known by the local name of iron-stone, from its great hardness and toughness and from its great weight. The origin of these dikes is well known. They have been produced by volcanic agency, which, acting from below upon horizontal beds of stratified rock, has cracked and fissured them at right angles to their planes of stratification, and these vertical cracks have been filled up with the melted rock or lava from below. The perpendicular fissures through which it has found its way upward are seldom seen, nor should we expect to see much of them, for along the line of these the rocks have been most broken up and shattered and the denudation has been greatest."
Even in traversing the karroos there were curious and awesome sights to attract and impress the mind of a traveller beholding for the first time these desert wastes so widely spread over the face of South Africa. They differ little in appearance except in size. The Great or Central Karroo, which lies beneath the foothills of the Zwarte Bergen range, has a sweep to the north of more than three hundred miles in a rolling plateau ranging in elevation from two to three thousand feet. Day after day, as the diamond-seekers from Cape Town plodded on with their creaking wagons, the same purpled brown face was outspread before them of the stunted flowering shrub which has given its name to the desert, spotted with patches of sun-cracked clay or hot red sand. To some of the Scotchmen this scrub had the cheery face of the heather of their own Highlands, and homesick Englishmen would ramble far through the furze to pick the bright yellow flowers of plants that recalled the gorse of their island homes. These common bushes, rarely a foot in height, and the thick, stunted camel-thorn were almost the only vegetable coating of the desert.
“Jesus replied: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: "Love your neighbor as yourself."”
– Matthew 22:37-39