The following day we were on our way again at sunrise. An hour afterwards we entered the most desolate region it had so far been our ill luck to traverse. Trees and palms disappeared, and their place was taken by coarse dry elephant grass eight or ten feet in height. The country bore unmistakable signs of having been under water not so very many seasons before. It was pitted in every direction by elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus tracks, which must have been made when the earth was very soft, as they averaged from a foot to eighteen inches in depth. These caused us great inconvenience, as, being hidden by the long grass, we stumbled in and out of them in a most unpleasant way, jarring our teeth and our tempers with great frequency. In our endeavours to find some sort of a path we lost the river, leaving it as we thought on our extreme left, and in searching for it, to our intense surprise, we walked nearly into it. It was flowing between perfectly perpendicular banks about six feet in height, and in a direction at right angles to its course at the commencement of the morning’s march. It was now little more than a large ditch, and required to be followed very carefully, as there were no trees on the banks to mark its position. This immense dried swamp is called by Mr. Chanler the Kirrimar Plain. Personally I am of opinion that in wet seasons, or after a series of wet seasons, that portion of it immediately adjoining the river forms part of a swamp or chain of swamps, to which the name Lorian is given. My reasons for this supposition are given in the next chapter. We followed the river very carefully, as, in the event of its taking a sudden curve, we should have been absolutely lost, and in that case must inevitably have perished. Indeed, the men were already very frightened, and grumbled openly. They declared that we had got to the end of the world, and had much better turn back before worse befell us. The presence of numbers of rhinoceros had very much frightened them. We encountered over thirty of them on one march; and quite half a dozen times had to warily circumnavigate some ungainly member of the species who was grazing directly in our path. We paid no attention to this display of insubordination on the part of the men, but pushed on, every obstacle to our progress only serving to encourage us still more to persevere in our effort to reach the much-desired goal. The heat on this open plain was tremendous; it must have been above 120° Fahr. We were only a matter of about 800 feet above sea-level, and consequently encountered the full force of the vertical rays of the equatorial sun.