"Whew!" exclaimed Nick. "What, did those Dutch beggars bury him in the well after that fashion, then? Well, I always thought the Dutch to be brutes, but I never could have believed--" "Stop that, Nick," interposed Frank. "Have you forgotten that the Hottentot himself told us that it was the Bushmen who buried him?" "Oh, ay, to be sure, I had forgotten that," said Gilbert. "Go on, doctor. Did the Dutch send a commando after him?" "Omatoko says that the Dutch had given up their system of commandos for several years, and could not easily organise them again, but they employed the Bushmen to seize any of the fugitives, and paid a large price for every one brought in." "But if that is true, what made the Bushmen bury Omatoko in that way, instead of carrying him to the Dutch to claim the reward?" asked Warley. "I must say, Charles, that sounds very suspicious." "So it did to me, Ernest," said Charles; "but the Hottentot answered me, readily enough, that the Dutch would have paid the same sum for a runaway's head, as they would if he had been brought to them alive. He declared that the Bushmen hated him, for having repeatedly escaped them, and for having several times requited their outrages in kind. He said they meant to have left him in the well, to die of cold and hunger; after which they would have cut off his head and carried it to the nearest Dutch village." "Well, that might be true, I suppose," said Wilmore. "Yes, I think so. The story hung well together. I could detect no flaw in it." "Did you ask him whether he would act as our guide to Cape Town?" inquired Ernest. "Yes, and he said he would; but we could not go the way I had proposed, along the course of the Great Fish or Koanquip rivers. He knew them both perfectly, so he affirmed; but neither route would be safe. We must go still further eastward--into the Kalahari in fact--he told me." "What is the Kalahari?" asked Frank. "A vast sea of sand," said Lavie, "extending for more than four hundred miles, from the borders of Namaqua-land to the country of the Bechuanas. There is not, so far as I know, a single river, lake, or even fountain, to be found in the whole region." "What on earth are we to go there for?" cried Gilbert. "We should soon die of hunger or thirst, or heat!" "Well no, not that," said the surgeon. "A great part of the sand is covered with dense scrub, which affords something like shade, and though there is neither river nor pool, yet if you dig down a few feet you will generally find a supply of water. Life may be sustained there; indeed, tribes of Bushmen and Bechuanas are to be found in most parts of it. But I should think it was the most miserable dwelling-place to be found on the face of the earth." "Well, then, why are we to go there?" repeated Nick, irritably.