These ancient gravels gave great promise of being diamondiferous, and here and there among the pebbles a huge water-worn crystal would bring our hearts into our mouths with its perfect resemblance to a rough Koh-i-noor; but we had no means of working the gravels with us and found no diamonds. We questioned our “boys” about diamonds--they had heard vague rumours of those at Luderitzbucht, and they spoke of a big one that had been sold at Steinkopf years ago for many cattle. Just above the drift on the German side there is a remarkable and beautiful mountain called by the Germans the “Lorelei.” It is triple-peaked, like a Bishop’s mitre, and affords a striking background to the placid stretches of tree-fringed river below it. Behind it, northward, the ranges are exceptionally high and rugged. Southward, on our bank, there is a tract of several miles of country covered with an absolute maze of quartz outcrops, literally thousands of them, but mostly hungry and barren; and in the mountains behind them there are many old copper workings, mostly dating from the time of Alexander’s venture, but some, far more ancient, the work of Hottentots, who used copper hammers and gads for their work. But by far the most striking of all the mineral outcrops that this sterile and desolate region affords is to be seen about a mile below the drift, where the river twists abruptly round a hog-backed, precipitous hill some 800 feet high. This hill is known as Jackal’s Berg, and from the southern spur of it there outcrops a most wonderful reef of hæmatite. Huge black blocks of it, each of many tons in weight, have rolled down the slope into a valley of pure white quartz adjoining it, and the effect of the glaring contrast of colour in the strong sunshine is remarkable. The reef extends for many miles, the ore is extremely high-grade and with a very low percentage of sulphur, and will some day be of great value. Near this reef, and a few miles lower downstream, there spreads a region of comparatively recent volcanic activity, a gruesome wilderness of scorched scoriæ, calcined shale, and schist, with innumerable outcrops of iron ore, all absolutely barren of any trace of verdure, dead and desolate as one imagines the craters of the moon. And below this the tangle of trees and bush bordering the river was an absolute jungle that we tried in vain to break through, and here in a patch of bare sand I saw more leopard spoors than I had ever seen before.