In one of the scherms was a newly-born baby, a girl. It weirdly resembled a hairless, light-yellow monkey. I made the mother very happy by presenting her with a shilling and my only pocket-handkerchief,--a red bandana. The shilling judiciously invested at compound interest, might provide the youngster with a dowry. After a long, monotonous and extremely hot walk, we got beyond the convoluted gorge and once more began to descend towards the river. We now had a view of the level coast desert--or would have had if the landscape had not been to a great extent shrouded in fog. The river had widened and apparently become deeper. After its plunge into the abyss at Aughrabies, its struggle for many hundred miles through the depths of the black, torrid gorge,--it advanced with silent, stately, deliberate stride to rejoin the ocean--the mother that gave it birth. The landscape ahead had completely altered its character. On the northern side of the river it was still mountainous, but the mountains had receded somewhat, and they rapidly decreased in height to the westward. On the southern side the mountain range came to an abrupt ending. Rounded hillocks emerged here and there from the plain which, as it approached the coast, was carpeted with patches of white, slowly-drifting fog. This made the detail difficult to appraise. We descended the flank of the last really high mountain, intending to rest just below the lordly gate of the immense labyrinth from which we had emerged,--from the threshold of which the mist-shrouded plains extend to the Atlantic. For when the hot winds of the desert stream over the cold antarctic current that washes this coast, they draw up moisture which is blown back landward in the form of vapour. Herein lies the explanation of the circumstance that the coast desert is occasionally, for months at a time, densely shrouded in mist. There--before the mountain gate--where the wearied water glided away in thankful silence from the last of the thunderous rapids that vexed its course,--was one of the favourite resorts of the only remaining school of sea-cows on that side of Africa, south of the tropical line. Of all the myriad hosts of wonderful wild creatures that until lately populated these desert plains and mountains, only this one school of hippopotami and a few hundred springbuck survive. I could hardly hope to find the sea-cows--at all events while daylight lasted; it would suffice if at night I might listen to their snorting and blowing--to the rustling in the reed-brakes as the huge creatures emerged from the water in search of food. These sounds would bring back memories of days long past--of adventures in other pastures of South Africa's rich and varied wonderland.