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Updated: May 12, 2025
As it was necessary, in view of his special programme of work, to penetrate below the surface of the glacier, and reach, if possible, its point of contact with the valley bottom, Agassiz had caused a larger boring apparatus than had been used before, to be transported to the old site on the Aar glacier.
Between Matjesfontein and the great camp of De Aar there is little to interest or amuse the traveller. The only town which is at all worthy of the name is Beaufort West, nestling amid its trees, a bright patch of colour amid the neutral tints of the hills and surrounding country. Here reside many patients suffering from phthisis, for the air is dry and warm and the rainfall phenomenally small.
Should you have occasion to mention this arrangement to the friends of fossil ichthyology, pray do so; it seems to me for the interest of the matter that it should be known. . .I propose to resume with new zeal my researches upon the fossil fishes as soon as I return from an excursion I wish to make in July and August to the glacier of the Aar, where I hope, by a last visit this year, to conclude my labors on this subject.
General Gatacre with a weak brigade at Queenstown is watching this invasion which as yet he seems hardly strong enough to repel. The rest of the troops are required in the protection of the railways, of the depôt of stores at De Aar, and the bridge at Orange River. But Kimberley was invested and Mafeking in danger, and the effect of the fall of either of them upon the Cape Dutch might be serious.
The broad meadows and the steel-blue river remind me of the meadows of Unterseen, and the river Aar; and beyond them rise magnificent snow-white clouds, piled up like Alps.
To protect the great depôt of military stores at De Aar and the railway from that point to the Cape a considerable force is needed, and to stem the tide of Boer invasion and Dutch disaffection, which has spread from the Orange River to Tarkastad and Dordrecht, from Colesberg to Barkly East, a further large force is badly wanted.
It was as lonely as a calm at sea, except for the noise of the river. I had overworn myself, and that sustaining surface which hides from us in our health the abysses below the mind I felt it growing weak and thin. My fatigue bewildered me. The occasional steeps beside the road, one especially beneath a high bridge where a tributary falls into the Aar in a cascade, terrified me.
We were delighted at the prospect of getting rid of our enforced inaction at De Aar. The air was full of rumours about an impending attack on Cronje's position, and we fully expected to be in time for the fight and probably to be employed as stretcher-bearers during the battle. Alas! our hopes were all in vain.
On the farther side of this plain ran the Jura mountains, which are like a northern wall to Switzerland, and just before you reach them is the Frontier. The Jura are fold on fold of high limestone ridges, thousands of feet high, all parallel, with deep valleys, thousands of feet deep, between them; and beyond their last abrupt escarpment is the wide plain of the river Aar.
We breakfasted at a neat inn in the village of Lassera, and afterwards went to see the chief curiosity of the place, the separation of a rivulet into two branches, one of which falls into the Lake of Neufchâtel, and eventually through the rivers Aar and Rhine into the German Ocean; the other runs into the Lake of Geneva, and by means of the Rhone at length reaches the Mediterranean.
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