With the awful example of what had happened to Klaas well before him, he still persisted in his assurance of what we should find if we followed him, and we therefore turned back upstream without further loss of time, for our stores were wellnigh exhausted. There was a moon, and we trekked late, leaving the river by a side-ravine, winding and twisting between abrupt peaks, and always rising. By midnight we were almost clear of the mountains, and off-saddled for a few hours. There was not a vestige of food for the horses, nor a twig or bush to make a fire with. We were bitterly cold, and after vainly endeavouring to sleep, were glad to be moving again. Crossing a low rocky ridge, we emerged upon an almost level sandy plateau, with a few isolated peaks here and there, and made our way for some hours towards a peculiar-looking kopje, jet black, and looking as though made of shining anthracite coal. Around it lay thousands of tons of titaniferous iron-sand, and, turning its base, we found an entirely new panorama. A wide sand-river stretched away to the south, and the peaks beyond it were quite different in appearance from those we had traversed. They appeared to be tilted quartzite; in places the bedding was clearly defined, in others tossed and contorted in a most fantastic manner. Striking across the plateau, we almost immediately came upon a small herd of springbok, the first we had seen. We needed fresh meat badly, and after about three hours of the chase, in which the buck displayed considerably more knowledge of the locality than we did, we still needed it. It was terrifically hot, we were dog-tired and thirsty, and the mirage was so strong all around that we could not always tell whether there was one buck or twenty, or whether they were a hundred yards away or five hundred. But that was not our reason for abandoning the chase. Ransson sat down on a red-hot rock and mopped his brow. “Look here,” he said; “after all, these poor little things have done us no harm--why should we shoot them?” I agreed, and explained that I had been merely shooting near them, just to see their antics when the bullet struck, and had not dreamed of hitting them; also that we’d better leave off in case we did. “Yes,” agreed Ransson, “we’ll chuck it--anyhow we’ve no more cartridges!” So we trudged on for three hours after the horses, which were already miles ahead.