Samuel said we must wait for the _nacht zon_ (night sun), as he called the moon, and so in the dark we sat and waited for it to rise, whilst the “boys” clucked and muttered and Ransson sucked his empty pipe and took intermittent counsel from Whymper by matchlight, and I funked and worried and wondered why I hadn’t the moral courage to take the whole crowd back! At long last came the moon, and we started, Sam in advance, then Ransson and his horse, then Jacob and the pack-mule, whilst I led my horse, and the expedition, strategically from the rear. For two hours we clung and stumbled and slid diagonally across and down that almost perpendicular face, clinging to shrubs, following cracks where we actually had to place the horses’ hoofs for them, urging them to scramble over horrible little water-worn places where, once they lost momentum or hesitated, they must have gone to the bottom, and eventually striking a very narrow ledge where there was sand and a firmer footing. I hugged myself, for we surely must be half-way down; in fact, I had just begun to whistle from sheer relief when Sam--who had gone on ahead--came back. We must go back, he said; it was impossible to get through that way; we must try back above the sand. Then Ransson went and had a look, and at last I did myself. The sand-gully ended in a fairly level patch flanked by titanic granite boulders, and, creeping between, we again looked down a sheer precipice--in fact, this particular spot overhung the sand about three hundred feet below. We were dog-tired, and I refused flatly to go a step farther in the treacherous moonlight. So we off-saddled and turned in, the last straw being our discovery that the water-bags on the pack-mule were empty, bone dry. The “boys” had been helping themselves; and that night we thirsted. In the morning, parched and anxious, we started back and tried another route, and after four hours of nightmare, during which Ransson, who was now ahead, absolutely built a path for the horses over hundreds of feet, we came safely to the bottom. A couple of hours’ hurried trek and we reached Gauna Gulip, passing plenty of springbok on the way and not even troubling to shoot at them--we were too thirsty.