All the morning the heat had been great, and it was now terrific; the bush on the plateau was too stunted to afford any shade, and we were glad to get going again. This plateau was really a divide--a small tableland--about 3,000 feet high, and from it a veritable Switzerland of mountains could be seen stretching in all directions. We were accustomed to mountains by this time, but those ahead of us were so weird-looking as to appear absolutely unreal! We had passed range after range already, but in most cases the gullies, and even some of the slopes, had been covered with vegetation of a sort--queer, fantastic plants and cacti--but still vegetation! But these queer peaks were stark and bare and of the most startling colours. In serrated lines they stretched out like the teeth of a saw, and their crumbling slopes of rotten schist were of every shade of red, of brick-red, of flaring vermilion, of bright orange-red, in fact of every red-hot gradation of colour. And across their flaming flanks, in startling contrast, were drawn long broad bands of intense black, sharply defined in huge zigzags, and looking as though they had been scrawled across the scorching landscape by an enormous pencil. Between these strange peaks “ran” rivers of glaring white and yellow sand, and riding through this uncanny goblin-land the weird stories of huge snakes and monsters told us by the Hottentots seemed no longer impossible. The whole land seemed dead, burnt up, absolutely devoid of life; not a bird or other living creature was to be seen anywhere, though the spoors of _wilde paarde_ here and there in the sand showed where mountain zebra occasionally roamed. For hours we rode down and down the slopes till at length we entered a wide stretch of bare sand flanked by mountains; this also gradually sloped and narrowed till it became a tortuous defile, on either hand of which towered abrupt and red-hot looking cliffs. The heat was appalling; it struck back from glaring sand and rocks as from a furnace, and I was soon parched with thirst. We knew there was plenty of water a few hours ahead of us, and I for one was thankful for the knowledge. For nothing accentuates thirst like anxiety as to when it can be quenched, and luckily we felt none.