That mountain tract stretching like a back-bone through Namaqualand, parallel with the coast upon which the Atlantic ceaselessly thunders, is the region which catches the sparse, south-western winter rains,--but which in summer is the abode of drought. On the in-lying Bushmanland plains the winters are quite arid; it is only in summer, when occasional thunderstorms stray down from the north-east, that the level desert gets rain. In a season when the Storm Gods go forth mightily to war on the aether seas, and the capricious heavens are bountiful, it is a striking experience to climb, on a torrid afternoon, some peak jutting from the eastern margin of the mountain tract, and from there to watch the ordered procession of the thunder-ships as they sweep down from their far-off port of assembly. Like great battle-craft, black beneath and equipped with dreadful artillery,--their dazzling decks heaped and laden with ocean-gleaned merchandise of crudded white,--they charge menacingly across the illimitable plains as though to overwhelm the granite ranges. But each stately vessel barely touches some outlying buttress; then the aery hull swerves and changes its course due south, bearing its most precious freight to more fortunate regions. It is as though some immense, invisible fender were being lowered from the sky to guard the range from the shock of impact. There came good news from Bushmanland; thunderstorm after thunder-storm had trailed over the plains, each marking its path with verdure and filling every rock-depression with water. The drought had broken, so my long-postponed trip to Pella, that remote outpost of French-Roman Catholicism, could be undertaken. Pella lies where the iron mountains, like a leash of black panthers, spring from the northern margin of the plains,--and then sink to their lair in that great gorge through whose depths the Orange River swirls and eddies with its drainage of a million hills. We were to travel with horses along a route I had special reasons for wishing to take, but which, had the drought still prevailed, we would not have dared to traverse. But under the existing circumstances it would never be necessary to travel more than twenty miles without finding a spot where a water-pit might be dug.