The country first passed through on leaving Tati was now fresh and green, with abundance of water along the road. Their first evening the party halted at “Mopani Pan,” a small pond full of reeds and surrounded by tall mopani trees, a few miles from Tati. This pond is a favourite halting-place for travellers between the Tati and Ramaqueban Rivers, but soon becomes dry in the winter season. Here the party remained four days, hunting; troops of quagga, blue wildebeest, and waterbuck being met with. The veldt about here, though stony and for the most part very bare of vegetation, produced some fine white lilies, now in bloom. [Illustration: CAMP IN THE VELDT.] Advancing again, on November 7th, to the Ramaqueban, they proceeded slowly up that river, and halted again for a short time four days afterwards, at the point where Frank Oates had stopped to hunt when here the previous August,--the point at which the road for the Zambesi turns off from the Ramaqueban again towards the Tati. Here the latter had now a hut of branches made by the boys for himself to lie in, as the heat in the waggon was insufferable. This was some relief from the usual state of things experienced about this time. “The flies,” he writes one day at this encampment, “are perfectly maddening. One wakes early, when it is comparatively cool, looking forward without much pleasure to the coming day of heat and discomfort--no comfortable spot to retire to from the heat, and every place dirty and crowded. How different,” he concludes, “from the luxuries experienced in some hot countries!” Here, on one occasion, his boys brought him some fine barbel, taken in the river, which proved delicious eating when rolled in meal and fried in fat and oil. On the 13th, whilst still at the same point, Frank Oates’s old ally, Van Roozen, arrived with Piet Jacobs, the Dutchman, from the direction of the Makalakas, the former of whom tried, it appears, to dissuade his late employer from attempting the Zambesi at the present season, a notion he was evidently by this time seriously entertaining. Both these Dutchmen, as it chanced, were acquainted with the spot near the Ramaqueban River where the Bushmen, whose remains Frank Oates had already made more than one fruitless endeavour to obtain, had been massacred the year before. Still anxious, if possible, to secure some of them, and finding he was now within easy access of the spot, he entered into an arrangement with Jacobs to conduct him there; but again, as on former occasions, when the time arrived for setting off, his guide was not forthcoming. Jacobs, however, before leaving, had fortunately on this occasion found a substitute in the person of Van Roozen, through whose guidance the traveller was at last successful in his search, as thus related in his Journal:--