If my readers will take the trouble to look at an old map of South Africa they will find the whole vast track of the west which lies to the north of the Orange River, and includes Bechuana Land and Damara Land, described as desert, and the Kalahari Desert in the eastern portion of it. Kolobeng lay at the extreme west of what we know to-day as the Transvaal, some two hundred and fifty miles from Pretoria, and was more than four thousand feet above sea level, near the sources of the Limpopo River, which flows north and east, until it finally joins the ocean at Delagoa Bay. A straight line to Lake Ngami would have taken the travellers in a north-westerly direction a distance of little more than three hundred miles. But it is doubtful whether they could have survived such a journey across an untrodden route, even if they had known accurately where the great lake lay. They were certainly well inspired to go due north to the Zouga River, and then follow it westward to the lake, though this route must have added two hundred miles to their journey. Three other Europeans, Colonel Steele, Mr. Murray, and Mr. Oswell--the latter one of Livingstone’s life-long friends and a mighty African hunter, joined the expedition, which started on June 1st, 1849, and reached the lake on August 1st. Livingstone has given us a most graphic and detailed description of the desert with its sandy soil, its dry beds of ancient rivers, its trackless plains, its prairie grass, its patches of bushes, and the singular products of its soil with roots like large turnips that hold fluid beneath the soil, and above all the desert water-melons on which the Bushmen as well as the elephants and antelopes, and even lions and hyænas subsist. The Bushmen he found a thin, wiry, merry race capable of great endurance, as indeed the denizens of the desert must be. They existed under conditions that inspired the Bechuana with terror, for to add to the other dangers the desert was at times infested with serpents.