So day after day we cleaned and scraped hole and hole of the water-worn gully; carefully panning the stuff in a bathful of our precious water, using the latter over and over again, and losing not a drop; and still we could not find even a “colour” of the precious metal. In the mountain slopes above there were outcrops of quartz in all directions; most of these, however, were of white, glassy-looking stuff, and showed no signs of being mineralised; but day after day, after our failure in the gullies, we tested these systematically, separating, going off in different directions with a little food and a prospect-hammer, and a boy carrying a bag, and bringing back heavy loads of samples, to be laboriously pounded down to a fine powder with pestle and mortar, and as laboriously tested--and still no trace of gold. Minerals there were in abundance--copper especially. In all directions the rocks were discoloured blue or green with it; here and there the quartz was speckled bright with the silvery-looking crystal of molybdenite, in more than one place we found rich galena; yet, though these diverse minerals were to be seen almost everywhere, in no case were they in sufficient bulk to warrant extensive work being done on them. Samples, samples, everywhere--though one or two huge cappings of hæmatite were well worth going through to see what kind of a pie their thick crust covered! It was wearying work after a while, when the hope of finding gold became less and less, hard work that tore hands to pieces with the sharp razor-like splinters of the quartz, the scorching sun turning the rocks so hot that they blistered one, and all around a glare of sun, sand, and barren mountain-sides that made one’s eyeballs burn as though they were being slowly roasted. And except for our few “boys” in the gullies near the camp, an absolute silence, unbroken except for the occasional scream of a _dassie vanger_, as the big eagles are called that sweep round the slopes of the peaks in search of an unwary rock-rabbit. Bird life and animal life were very scarce; though on the higher peaks the chamois-like _klip bok_ was plentiful, and would have afforded good sport had we been there for that purpose; but we were after gold, and contented ourselves with “cookies” and the tinned food from our stores. Of human beings we saw none; indeed, we had not seen a soul except a solitary native at the little farm at Groot Derm since we had left the _nachtmaal_ meeting at Springklip.