Here I got letters, including certain instructions which sent me bucketing off again to Zendling’s Drift, accompanied only by Klaas, whilst Ransson and his henchman proceeded to a spot about twenty miles lower downstream. My work at Zendling’s concluded, I tried to rejoin him by following the river-bank; but after two days of cutting and hewing through densely tangled thorn scrub and fallen trees, I found that, with a horse at any rate, it was impossible to make a way through, and had reluctantly to make a long detour through the mountains. I was absolutely out of stores, and the last two days Klaas and I lived on a tin of jam and a small tin of rancid sardines, without bread or any substitute for it. And I was therefore glad to find Ransson with a steaming three-legged pot full of flamingo. He shot these each day with a rifle as they strutted on a sand-spit on the German side, for his stores were finished too, and we had no chance of replenishing. And there was still a good deal to be done. But good as the flamingoes tasted, they soon got shy and we were often extremely hard put to it, for there was no game near this spot. And so I came to actually enjoy dassie, and to forbear to turn my nose up at roasted leguaan’s tail, and to be thankful for a good many other weird dishes which I had, perhaps, better not particularise. Varied as was our diet, however, our work was now monotonous, and, as it lay in ground already described, would be of little interest to the reader; and a few weeks later we returned to Port Nolloth and Cape Town. Before proceeding to the latter I travelled again to Steinkopf to endeavour to find out more of a certain big diamond that a native had once sold there for a waggon and a number of oxen, but could get no definite information, as the man had left the mission some time. Mr. Kling, however, promised to get me full information later; meanwhile he was confident upon one point: the stone had come from somewhere above the Great Falls, and my thoughts travelled back to Brydone’s story and the “pans” of the Kalahari. Meanwhile these two long trips in the least-known part of Klein Namaqualand had made a profound impression upon me. True, we had tried in vain for gold, but we had been misled into frittering much valuable time away, and, considering the size of the region we had penetrated, we had, after all, barely scratched it. There were hundreds of reefs we had not even sampled, hundreds of gullies where the most promising-looking gravels lay deep and undisturbed, for we had been handicapped by the Namaqualander’s greatest handicap--want of water. Copper there was in bewildering abundance, galena, iron, and the other base metals on all hands, and in the few places where water had allowed of “panning” the results had often been surprising. But widely distributed as were these mineral riches, it was perfectly obvious that to exploit them to any advantage would mean a colossal scheme with a colossal capital.