C tIRRENT LITERATURE.
THE DIAMOND SEEKERS.
The Diamond Seekers. By Ernest Glanville. (Mackie and Son. as.)—An English boy and a Cape boy come across each other by some strange coincidence, go out to South Africa, and thence with a Cape waggoner and a Kaffir boy undertake the quest of some diamonds against a rival party. An easy enough plot on which to build adventures, but not one out of which we should have thought it possible to get such a long- sustained and exciting duel as The Diamond Seekers proves. The stealthy struggle in the Karroo -with its varying fortunes, the cunning moves of Si Amos and Mark Clinton, and then Rcei Stoffel and Van Snaar, and the mysterious movements of the little brown man, are extraordinarily vivid. Si Amos, who has the bushcraft of the Kaffir, and Rooi Stoffel, the Boer guerilla—a most striking and impressive specimen of a type—are not puppets ; Mr. Glanville knows the Boer and the "native born" too well to draw other than real living men. No writer knows the veld better, or the life of its dwellers and its birds and beasts. The busheraft of Si Amos is really fascinating, and beyond all this circumstance, which gives so strong a bodily form to Mr. Glan- ville's creations, he has, perhaps more than other men, the gift of conveying the powerful, if intangible, charm of South Africa, the air, the trekking, the storms, the wonderful nights, the strange animals, and the unseen attractions of the unknown and the remote. The Diamond Seekers is not a mere tale of adven- tures; it is a study—a faithful and vigorous study—of character and strenuous endeavour, of human wit and endurance pitted against each other,painted into a scenery generally allowed to have extraordinary and undeniable capacity for stirring the blood and thrilling the imagination. We will undertake that most boys and men will learn more from The Diamond Seekers of the wilder phases of the life it depicts and national characteristics than from histories or articles or hearsay. We are grateful to the author of "The Fossicker " for this return to his true province of romance and adventure. The four seekers—we include the ?loss Kaffir— are fine characters; one is as good as another; yet the peculiarities of each are carefully indicated and form the principal attraction of the story. Mr. Glanville contrives to say something in every sentence ; he is never slack and always writes with purpose. The camp-fire stories which Si Amos tells of the crocodile and the wild dog and the porcupine are alone a delight, and skilfully woven into the narrative.
Previous page
