Each morning when the sun first grew hot, the vley was invaded by countless myriads of desert grouse. Of these we shot some hundreds, which we salted down for home consumption. CHAPTER ELEVEN. THE RICHTERSVELD--KUBOOS--THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD REDIVIVUS-- GOLD-SEEKING--THE RAAD--MORBID SENSIBILITY--START FOR EL DORADO. Just before the Orange River, wearied from its long travail, slides into the Atlantic, it bends in a sickle-shaped curve. Its course for the previous three hundred miles has been through the tremendous and almost inaccessible gorge into whose depths it hurled itself at the Augrabies Falls. The incidence of those aggregates of men which pass, like the individual, through the successive stages of youth, maturity and decay, and which we are accustomed to term civilisations, is as much a question of geology as of geography. Accadia and Egypt grew great and stained many pages of the record we term history by virtue of the circumstance that the Euphrates and the Nile, after leaving the mountains that gave them birth, flowed respectively through low, level countries which they enriched with precious alluvium. The Orange River was, however, sped oceanwards over a vast plateau of hard-grained rock, several thousand feet above sea-level. Into this the stream has been slowly biting, and the alluvium--that meat upon which material civilisation is nourished, was hurled through the channel and flung wastefully into the maw of the all-consuming waves. Under different physiographical circumstances another Alexandria might have arisen where to-day the flamingo nests among the misty dunes at the Orange River's mouth, "and another Sphinx, of Hottentot or Bantu physiognomy, might have stood, gazing through forgotten centuries, across the waste of Bushmanland." [_Between Sun and Sand_.] The tract lying within the sickle-bend is called the Richtersveld. Little is known of this tract or of its inhabitants. Half a century ago prospecting for copper ore was carried on in the vicinity. Indications of the metal abounded, but no payable deposit was discovered. I decided to organise an expedition to the Richtersveld. There were several reasons for doing this. One was a complaint which had been made to the Attorney General of the Cape Colony respecting the alleged flogging of a man under orders of the missionary at Kuboos, which is still haunted by the ghost of an institution established by the London Missionary Society in years long gone by. Another was a reported discovery of gold. This, as a matter of fact was my ostensible excuse for starting at the time I did. Third and last was my own keen desire to explore a little-known tract and make the acquaintance of its human and other inhabitants.