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The following year I took two hundred feet of rods with me, and again I was foiled. Eventually I succeeded in carrying up a thousand feet of line, and satisfied myself, after many attempts, that this was about the average thickness of the glacier of the Aar, on which I was working.
Before it was dark indeed one could still read I saw a group of houses beyond the Aar, and soon after I saw that my road would pass them, going over a bridge. When I reached them I went into the first, saying to myself, 'I will eat, and if I can go no farther I will sleep here. There were in the house two women, one old, the other young; and they were French-speaking, from the Vaud country.
One was the necklace of golden shells, divided from each other by beetles of emeralds, that I had taken from the Wanderer's grave at Aar, and the other the cross-hilted bronze sword with which this same Wanderer had been girded in his grave.
A warm bath and a lunch at the Royal Hotel with a good bottle of wine was very welcome, and we were all in excellent spirits when the whistle sounded and we steamed away once more to the north with 600 miles before us. We halted again at De Aar, where we remained till Christmas. The weather grew hotter and hotter.
Kimberley and Mafeking were then already invested, and the bombardment at both places begun. The British troops had evacuated Stormberg Junction November 3, falling back to the southward toward Sterkstrom and Queenstown; thus abandoning railroad communication between East London, one of the sea bases, and the western theatre of war toward Naauwport and De Aar.
This done, with great labour we dragged the ship on to high ground, and above it built a mighty mound of earth. For twenty days we toiled at the task, till at last it was finished and the dead were hidden beneath it for ever. Then we separated to our homes and mourned a while. But Steinar was carried to the temple of Odin at Aar, and there kept in the prison of the temple.
The military authorities at De Aar exercised the utmost stringency in refusing permission to unauthorised civilians to stay in the camp or pass through it. These regulations were absolutely necessary.
Indeed there is wanting only the lakes of the Bernese Alps, glaciers as magnificent as those of Chamouni, and cascades like the Staubbach and the fall of the Aar to make this Caucasian range the most beautiful, as it probably is the most sublime, on the face of the earth.
Lord Roberts rode over from Osfontein to consult Lord Methuen, and they were joined by Lord Kitchener, who returned from his brief visit of inspection to Naauwpoort and De Aar. Mafeking was in greater embarrassment than ever had come upon Kimberley, and there was trouble in the spacious area of Cape Colony lying west of the Capetown-Kimberley railway.
Standing on the edge of the bluff which the city crowns, it dominates from its windows and terraces the valley of the Aar. Swift and unruffled, the river glides through the meadows like a sinuous ice-green serpent.
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