Once across and we were on an island of sand and silt, split up into deep channels by past floods, and with plenty of big trees; then came more rapid streams, which, however, were easily negotiable over the huge granite boulders that encumbered them. The last of these side-streams was running in absolutely the contrary direction to the others and the general course of the river, and, following it, we came to an open, boulder-encumbered spot, where it disappeared, but where we could still hear it rushing swiftly deep beneath us. And then came chaos: huge monoliths of riven rock, the size of houses, strewn and heaped about in the wildest confusion, piled on each other, balanced and tottering, a maze of bare stone without a vestige of vegetation. And now the dull murmur that had scarcely been noticeable became a muttering thunder of appalling depth: and emerging from a rift in the labyrinth of granite, we stood suddenly on the edge of a profound chasm, over the farther lip of which, a few hundred yards upstream, the huge muddy volume of the Orange was hurtling in one stupendous spout. The scene was absolutely terrifying, for the dark precipice, smooth as though chiselled, and dank and slippery with the incessant spray, fell sheer away from our very feet, and where it did not actually overhang, offered no foothold even for a baboon, whilst clouds of spray drove round us, and the solid rock trembled with the monstrous music of the fall. Rapidly converging from its width of a mile upstream, the Orange at this spot becomes pent in a deep channel, self-worn in the solid granite, until, when it takes its final plunge, it is concentrated into a terrific spout barely twenty yards in width, which hurls itself with incredible velocity over the precipice a sheer four hundred feet into the gloomy abyss below. And with the plunge it practically disappears into the unknown, for many miles penned in a gloomy cañon, quite unapproachable and scarce to be obtained a glimpse of, till it emerges into a slightly wider bed close to the German border; thence it winds a tortuous course through solitary, wellnigh unknown and uninhabited country, for the last two hundred miles of its course to the sea; surely the most lonely and deserted of South African rivers? For, with the exception of the tiny police posts at Scuit’s Drift and Ramon’s Drift, not a habitation stands on or near its banks, through all those tortuous reaches that wellnigh encircle the mountains of Richtersfeldt, whose solitary peaks and ravines I have already made shift to describe.