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Should we need this wagon it could always be sent for; or, if we found the Lydenburg hunting-ground, which he was so set upon visiting, unproductive or impossible, we could return to Pretoria over the high-veld and pick it up before proceeding elsewhere. These arrangements took us a couple of days or so.
Lydenburg, being seventy miles off the railway line, had a chain of posts connecting it with the junction at Machadodorp. These posts were seven in number, ten miles apart, each defended by 250 men. Of these Helvetia was the second. The key of the position was a strongly fortified hill about three-quarters of a mile from the headquarter camp, and commanding it.
Amid cloud-girt peaks and hardly passable ravines the two long-enduring armies still wrestled for the final mastery. To the north-east of Lydenburg, between that town and Spitzkop, there is a formidable ridge called the Mauchberg, and here again the enemy were found to be standing at bay.
This climate is found from the Queenstown district at about 3,000 feet elevation, extending north and westwards over the Stormberg, the Orange Free State, and along the lordly Drakensberg range and its spurs some 200 to 300 miles into the Transvaal, where the highest plateau levels occur between Ermelo and to near Lydenburg, viz., 6,500 feet.
A train, apparently with reinforcements, was also blown up, the engine and carriages going up in the air with fine effect. About the end of August, 1901, I met General Sir Bindon Blood at Lydenburg by appointment. We had arranged to discuss several momentous questions there, as we made little progress by correspondence.
It was evident that there could be no end to the war until these last centres of resistance had been broken up. The British forces had advanced as far north as Rustenburg in the west, Pienaar in the centre, and Lydenburg in the east, but here they had halted, unwilling to go farther until their conquests had been made good behind them.
A glance at the map will show that a force moving from this point in conjunction with another from Lydenburg might form the two crooked claws of a crab to enclose a great space of country, in which smaller columns might collect whatever was to be found. Without an instant of unnecessary delay the dispositions were made, and no fewer than eight columns slipped upon the chase.
In 1873 rich alluvial gold was reported to have been struck in the Lydenburg district, which was then the extreme limit which civilization had reached in the north-eastern Transvaal. I decided to go and try my fortune at the scene of the discovery. While passing through Pretoria I met a man in the street whose face I thought I knew. He advanced towards me with outstretched hand.
Drawn up on the opposite bank was a raft, by means of this the prospectors had crossed. We camped and considered the situation. We found two men with a wagon at the river. The owner of the wagon was an old Boer named Niekerk; he owned a farm in the Lydenburg District, but spent most of his life wandering about in search of game.
Abel Erasmus is the man who had desolated the Lydenburg district; the hero of the cave affair in which men, women, and children were closed up in a cave and burnt to death or suffocated; a man who is the living terror of a whole countryside, the mere mention of whose name is sufficient to cow any native. Mr.
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