So we retraced our steps to the river, with the intention of following its tortuous course to Zendling’s Drift, where we had been told Preuss’s guide was living--for this man was plainly an impostor. That night we spent by the solemn, lonely Orange, bathing and revelling in the cool water to our hearts’ content. We had brought but very little food with us, hoping for game; but we came across nothing, and regretfully resorted to the unsportsmanlike practice of putting a stick of dynamite in one of the deep pools, in the hope of getting some fish. About half a dozen little chaps the size of small herrings (a variety of _springer_) was the only result, and they were so absolutely full of bones as to be quite uneatable. We grilled them, and tried to imagine they were trout, but the only thing good about them was the smell! A moonlit river is always beautiful; the Orange (possibly because of its contrast with the wilderness of barren and forbidding mountains through which it has burst a way) seems incomparably so. Before turning in, I walked up the bank to a beautiful grassy spot, where I could see for some distance, and sat down, and looked at the majestic sweep of the water upstream. There was not a sound, for the nearest rapids were miles away, and not a ripple disturbed the mirror-like surface of the water, as the big volume of it swept slowly by, from the black, towering portals of the Tatas Berg mountains in the far distance. Above that gorge for at least a hundred miles its course is almost unknown, as for miles it is penned into a cañon between precipitous cliffs. It was all very tranquil and lonely, and I lay on the sweet turf and smoked, and pondered on the fact that, with the exception of Ransson and the guides, there was probably not a soul within many days’ journey. It made me feel quite sentimental, and I thought of the crowded towns I had known, and the crowded bars ... and the beer.... Then I heard a concertina ...! and I wondered if the sun had been too much for me. A concertina! here, in the most solitary spot imaginable! It appeared sheer lunacy, but there was no doubt about it, and I got up and cleared back to camp, prepared for any old thing. Ransson was sitting by the fire, smoking, and before him were capering two little stark naked Hottentot “boys,” imitating the antics of monkeys--in fact, dancing the so-called “baboon dance” of the Bushmen.