Business was brisk to-day.
Another traveller, he said, had just gone on towards Fauresmith.
"A young man like yourself, fresh from England," the farmer observed,
scanning Guy closely. "He's off for the diamond diggings. I think
to Dutoitspan."
Guy rested the right there, thinking nothing of the stranger, and
went on next day more quietly to Fauresmith. Thence to the diamond
fields, the country became at each step more sombre and more
monotonous than ever. In the afternoon they rested at Jacobsdal,
another dusty, dreary, comfortless place, consisting of about five
and twenty bankrupt houses scattered in bare clumps over a scorched-up
desert. Then on again next day, over a drearier and ever drearier
expanse of landscape. It was ghastly. It was horrible. At last, on
the top of a dismal hill range, looking down on a deep dale, the
driver halted. In the vast flat below, a dull dense fog seemed to
envelop the world with inscrutable mists. The driver pointed to it
with his demonstrative whip.
"Down yonder," he said encouragingly, as he put the skid on his
wheel, "down yonder's the diamond fields--that's Dutoitspan before
you."
"What makes it so grey?" Guy asked, looking in front of him with a
sinking heart.
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