when, after several readjustments, I got all the foregoing jammed into, or tied on to, the cart, we suddenly remembered that a place had still to be found for me. However, a Cape cart is a wonderful vehicle, and at last it was managed, and we trotted out of Upington on September 13th, 1911, the observed of half its inhabitants--two of whom again paid me the compliment of trying to jump my claim by the Gordonian method of “following” a mile or two ahead. We had six spanking mules, and made good progress downstream, near the bank of the river, which is here very beautiful; smiling “lands” of wonderful fertility showing what irrigation can do with the belt of silt brought down by this Nile of South Africa: vineyards, orchards, corn-lands, lucerne, oranges, fruit-trees--and all flanked abruptly by stony sterile desert or red sand-dunes, outliers of the Kalahari stretching to the north. Into these dunes the “road” soon led, and within a few miles of Upington the mules were straining at a cart up to the hubs almost in heavy sand. At nightfall we were at Keimoes, a most fertile little village, afterwards made famous as the scene of a fight with the infamous Maritz, who was wounded there. Here we slept, and getting away early and pressing on the whole of the day, were at North Furrow, opposite Kakamas, by nightfall, having done a good fifty miles of extremely heavy going in a little over a day and a half. Kakamas itself, the “Labour Colony,” the pioneer irrigation settlement of the Orange River, is on the southern bank and we were on the northern, and I had no opportunity then of seeing the actual village. We passed the night at Krantz Kop, with a most hospitable store-keeper named Miller, whose well-stocked little Winkel was at that time a good 200 miles from the railway (at Prieska), and the last store, indeed almost the last dwelling, in British territory. Here a few well-disseminated lies as to our destination had the effect of ridding us of the claim-jumpers, who had kept in sight of us from Upington, and who rode away before daybreak the following morning in the wrong direction entirely. From Krantz Kop downstream towards the German border the roads are atrocious for a few miles, and then cease altogether. The only track leads away from the river, crossing stony kopjes where every step tempts a smash-up, and leading directly towards a formidable barrier of red-hot-looking peaks. The surroundings become wilder at every step, and the strange shapes of the peculiar-looking vegetation, _koker-boomen_ (_Aloe dichotoma_), thorny candelabra euphorbia, and a variety of _melkbosch_ exactly like gigantic asparagus, lend a weird aspect to the landscape. The prevailing granite--pinkish and speckled with a profusion of rock garnet--is broken by numerous quartz reefs which, as one approaches the German border, gradually change from pure white through every shade of pink to the most beautiful of rose