As it would be moonlight we did not start till the cool of evening. Our track led across difficult foothills of granite débris, broken by innumerable ravines, to where a gap in the mountain barrier marked the entrance to the pass. Long before reaching it we struck a dry river-bed, pleasant with _cameel-doorn_, mimosa, and other greenery, whilst here and there thick beds of reeds showed that moisture was still in the soil. Altogether a very pleasant valley, but gradually the encircling peaks of tilted quartzite narrowed in, and at dusk we entered a gloomy ravine that led us to a narrow point. Through this, and we were in an absolute cañon. On either hand the river cliffs towered up hundreds of feet, in places absolutely overhanging, whilst the narrow stream-bed up which we struggled was a chaos of fallen rocks, débris, and huge boulders. Through this cramped Krantz the wind, concentrated as though driven through the nozzle of a huge bellows, tore with such force that we could scarcely make headway even where the going was fair. But hour after hour we blundered and stumbled and fought our way through this hideous gorge, in almost Cimmerian darkness, for we had been wrong in depending upon the moon; her light could scarcely reach us for hours after the open country had been made almost as light as day. Ransson was delirious and talking all sorts of rot, and yelling and singing defiance to the wind, and I was thankful indeed when at length the moon did appear overhead, and light up our difficult path. Then, suddenly, the profound gully ended, and we had to negotiate a slope of quite 45 degrees with scarce foothold for a cat, scrambling up, and up, breathlessly to a great height. A brief rest on a saddle-back ridge, a downward plunge into darkness again, through rocks, thorn, and other impedimenta, and again we were in the gorge. At length we emerged into a deep crater-like valley surrounded by high peaks, where we off-saddled and slept beside a tiny pool of water. Morning showed us most surprising surroundings. We were, in truth, in an actual crater, the huge encircling walls of which were of a new and extremely interesting formation. A huge upheaval had taken place at some remote period, and the riven rocks now reared aloft in abrupt peaks were of alternate layers of quartzite and of a conglomerate of a similar nature to the so-called _banket_ of the Rand. Enormous masses of this “pudding stone,” fallen from the peaks above, now cumbered the slopes on every side, and the beds of the ravines were full of it. The peaks showed over a thousand feet of alternate beds of this ferruginous conglomerate, and its resemblance to the gold-bearing reef of Johannesburg was so great that we thought we had stumbled on a new El Dorado.