There were several features of interest connected with the vley. The water had shrunk to a series of small puddles. Swimming about in every one of these were large numbers of tiny organisms, each with a single, immense eye. These creatures belonged to a species of "Apus,"--a genus of one of the crustacean sub-families. On a trip undertaken during the previous year I had found an Apus of another species in a vley less than thirty miles from Brabies,--a vley which probably does not contain water more than once in five years. This development of separate species in localities so close to each other, suggested that local conditions had not materially changed for a very long period. No vley was found to contain more than a single variety. These quaint creatures swim through their little hour of fully developed life and, when the drying up of the water kills them, the eggs they contain are freed. Then these are blown hither and thither among the dust of the desert until another adventitious shower fills the vley in which they were generated, and some chance wind-gust carries a few of them into the water. The indefinite preservation of the life-germ on the occasionally almost red-hot surface of the desert is little short of miraculous. Yes,--the Brabies vley must have existed under approximately similar conditions from an immensely remote antiquity. It is probable that in comparatively recent times rain was more plentiful in Bushmanland (as there is reason to believe it was generally throughout South Africa), than it now is. For there were evidences that Brabies was once a centre of population. Pottery, obviously of Bushman manufacture, abounded. If one broke a fragment, the charred fibres of the woven grass-blades on which the clay design had been formed, could be clearly seen. In the low, stone ledges surrounding the vley were to be seen grooves evidently caused by the sharpening of weapons. Some of these grooves were very deep, and as the Bushmen's arrow-heads were made of bone, the scores must have been the result of sharpening by many generations. A few of them looked as fresh as if they had been used the previous day. A careful search discovered stone implements of various types,-- palaeolithic as well as neolithic. These suggested a receding succession of prehistoric peoples to days unthinkably remote. Some of the weapons were very peculiar,--they were either spear-heads or arrow-heads. But they seemed too small for the former and too large for the latter. If they were spear-heads they must have been used by pygmies; if arrow-heads by giants. As there were apparently no springbucks worth the hunting on that side of the desert, we decided to return home at once. We thus had no opportunity of testing the qualities of the fearsome hunting-chariot-contraption constructed by Andries. I was not altogether sorry; my bones ached in anticipation of our probable experiences in it,--behind the half-broken team.