Our camping-place lay within the curve of one of the tentacles; it was expedient from the stand-point of the hunter to have the mounded sand between us and the plains--thus affording concealment. The sun was high when the yokes dropped once more. The unhappy oxen, now very thirsty, wandered about emitting low moans of distress. Their fundamental instincts told them that no water was near; their inherited faith in the wisdom and power of man had, however, given them the thought that relief might be provided. Suddenly, however, primordial instinct gained ascendency; their minds were made up. They paced, lowing, to the trail; then advanced along it at a trot. Soon the trot altered to a wild gallop. To-morrow, before noon, they would charge down on Gamoep--and woe to man or beast obstructing their course. Red-eyed, and with blackened tongues extended from roaring, tortured throats, they would fling themselves into the pool and drink their fill. At Gamoep they would remain for four restful days; then they would be brought back to our camp by Piet Noona and his nephew. So at length we were within the dominions of the Thirst King--our gauntlet thrown down at the gates of his wrath; we were almost within the grasp of his awful hand. The last link with the world inhabited by men snapped when the hapless oxen disappeared over the rim of the desert. Like a water-logged ship in a tideless sea--like a derelict among the Sargossa weeds,--the wagon stood in the solitude and silence, with the cloudless sky above and the sun-scorched earth beneath--with the dune-fiend watching us from his lair. It was almost an insult to the landscape--this wood-and-canvas construction of man, hauled jolting and groaning across the pathless desert by tamed and tortured beasts. It was a disfigurement on the face of Solitude,--an incorporate insult flung like a guage against the ramparts of one of Nature's most jealously guarded fortresses. Under the shadow of the wagon-sail we slept throughout the day; the sun was down before we awoke. Once more night put on the garment of life. It was a desert-dweller who wrote that the heavens declared the glory of God; the first astrologer must have had his home in the wilderness. Over the desert the stars, unfolding a glory not revealed elsewhere, descend like a swarm of bees and seem to busy themselves with destiny. Whispers of ghostly voices close at hand,--faint and far-off cries,-- flutters of spectral wings--pulsed through the darkness. In the desert, the brighter the firmament at night, the more intensely darkness seems to brood over the earth,--the more insistent becomes the idea that one is surrounded by living beings, unhuman and unimaginable.