Night fell; the primrose-yellow of the "toa" faded to ghostly white; not a breath of wind stirred. Excepting the creak, creak, of the straining yokes not a sound was audible. Day faded from the sky and the cupola of stars seemed to descend around us like a curtain. We walked apart and communed with our individual selves. When by night one enters the door of the desert speech seems banal and incongruous. At about midnight we outspanned. The oxen were, however, kept tied to the yokes; we meant to take but an hour's rest. The patient cattle laid themselves down at once; an occasional long-drawn sigh being the only evidence of their existence. Anon the flame of our candle-bush fire ascended into the windless air,--straight as a column. Coffee was soon ready and biscuits distributed. After we had eaten and drunk, pipes were lit. Then we threw ourselves prone on the sand and gazed, wrapt, into the glittering folds of the star-curtain. How unutterably still it was; how ineffably peaceful. The spell of silence still sealed our lips. The world of men--with its fierce and futile struggles, its crowded and ever-changing illusions, seemed but a dream. Could it be that in other regions of that earth, which there seemed so austere, so sinless and so ordered, men were struggling in warren-like cities? For that night, however, the desert was the only reality; there we seemed to have attained Nirvana. The hour of rest soon came to an end; once more the oxen were yoked and our wagon lumbered on. There was no longer a track to guide us; our wheels drew a double-furrow through soil that had never groaned to the share of a plough forged by mortal hands,--that will never yield a crop sown by man. There were no dangers to dread but snakes; no obstacles to avoid--except an occasional tract, ten to fifteen yards in diameter, which had been undermined by desert mice. Through the crust of such a tract the wagon would have sunk to the axles; accordingly a Hottentot was detailed to walk a few yards ahead and give notice of the fact should a mouse-city lie in our course. We steered neither by the compass nor the stars, not yet by any landmark. It was the instinct of Andries and his desert-bred servants,--that "sense of direction" possessed by men whose perceptions have not been destroyed by civilisation,--which enabled them to steer us, straight as an arrow, towards an unseen objective we should only reach two days later. A pallid gleam shot through the eastern sky; the stars grew faint; over the blue firmament stole, as it were, a sheen of pearl. Soon the rising moon touched the horizon's rim; as we gazed she soared above it. By the first touch of her level beam-wand, fairy-land was created; the plains, sombre since daylight had departed, became ivory-white to eastward; across their immensity extended a broad strip of silver. This was due to the sheen of the new moonlight on the dew-wet plumes arising from the "toa" tussocks.