They had a flock of goats with them, and appeared to live entirely on the milk. We bought a little of it later, giving tobacco and tea in return. They had a great idea of the value of their commodity, and doled it out very sparingly. Their fondness for tobacco is extraordinary, the women and young girls smoking quite as much as the men, and passing the hollow leg-bone of a buck, which serves them as a pipe, from lip to lip, as they squatted by the fire. They had two riding-oxen with them, fine-looking beasts with a rein passed through the nostril to guide them by, and saddled with ordinary horse-saddles of German military pattern. We used them on several of our excursions later, finding them excellent, both for pace, endurance and climbing powers, which they possess to a remarkable degree. With all this addition to the population, it was clear that the water would last only a few days; in fact, we were hard put to it to enable us to “pan” the cleaning up on the section of river-bed which the “boys” had bared for us. Still, we managed somehow, the remains of the water in which we had “panned” for gold all day serving us for making coffee at night; but in spite of all our efforts, we found no particle of gold, and reluctantly decided to abandon the spot, coming to the conclusion, at the time, that we had been shown the wrong spot, and that the gold had never been found there. Before leaving, however, we finished our exploration of the surrounding peaks, finding numerous traces of other metals, but no gold. As an instance of the variety of minerals scattered through this region, I may state that a single stick of dynamite in a faint splash of carbonate of copper disclosed more than a hundredweight of bornite, with galena, an essay of which, in Cape Town, gave 38 per cent. of copper and 24 oz. of silver to the ton, whilst within a fifty yards radius, fine samples of molybdenum, hæmatite, and copper-glance were found, and the sand-rivers were black with hundreds of tons of titaniferous iron-sand. Many of the rarer and lesser-known metals are undoubtedly present also in this region, tantallite being frequently met with in the sands and amongst the hæmatite débris, and the very large crystals occasionally met with point to the probability of large deposits of this valuable mineral awaiting systematic search. The ravines of this wild and remote spot were full of a beauty peculiarly their own, being luxuriant with vegetation of strange form and colour: _Varias euphorbia_, huge fleshy-trunked succulents, with brilliant scarlet flowers, aloes of different shapes and colours, and above all, a most glorious copper-coloured bush, known locally as the “Pride of Namaqualand,” all contrasting vividly with the milk-white of the quartz, and the brick-red of the red-hot-looking schist. Here of all places, the strange _Pachypodium namaquanum_ is abundant, and reaches a size I saw nowhere else: moreover, many of these giant succulents, of