bit in the face of circumstance. Walk a trifle over a thousand yards
from the edge of the changeful Atlantic through Swakopmund's deep sandy
streets and you get the key to the town. For it ceases utterly,
abruptly; from the door of its last villa, fitted with perfect
furnishings from Hamburg, the bitter desolation that is the Namib
Desert stretches away from your, very feet. Marvelling at this place, I
was particularly struck by the size of its cemetery. But I was not long
puzzled. If you strike Swakopmund on a fine sunshiny day you will be
pretty favourably impressed with the climate; it seems warm and
temperate, and the sun sparkles on the sea.

In a week or so you will learn to modify that judgment. More than half
the days we were at Swakopmund a heavy pall of dampness hung over the
place, and after a day or two of it one's system seemed to be badly
affected. Maybe we were not acclimatised, but the fact remains that a
very large proportion of us were down with a kind of dysentery,
attended by vomiting and violent pains in the stomach. Then there are
days when the winds blow from the desert--an indescribable experience.
They bring moths and flies with them, and great clouds of sand; it is a
genuine labour to breathe, and at noon and for two hours after the
temperature in the sun runs up into the "hundred-and-sixties."
Swakopmund is not a health resort; or perhaps we dwelt there in the
wrong season. But it is a monument to Teutonic determination. The
Germans willed this town there, planted it on the edge of the
wilderness; fitted it out, from bioscope theatre to church with organ
and electric organola; and they lived in it, with the climate of
perdition and all the accessories of a suburb of Berlin, and called it
a seaport. It is not a seaport; in a fair gale you can't land a barrel
of corks at the pier. But given time and they would have built in the
face of nature a two million pounds breakwater and everything complete.