Having made the old women happy with tobacco and tea, we once more started, this time in light marching order with the Hottentots as porters, towards a peculiar conical kopje a mile or so downstream, which denoted the mouth of the Molopo. We found the ancient river-bed (which can be followed right through the Kalahari to Kuruman) dry, and choked from bank to bank with huge mounds of sand, but a little farther up its course, where the banks were still exposed, there was ample evidence to show that in the not far distant past a huge volume of water had flowed. Even the miserable little channel, worn deep in the débris that chokes the old bed, and which shows where an occasional trickle of water finds a way down after rain in the desert, was now bone dry, and it was evident that once away from the Orange we should have anxiety about water. It was on the western bank of the Molopo, on a ridge of abrupt kopjes leading to the higher land to the north, that our guide, de Wet, had stumbled on the old waggon in a recent trip, and from it we hoped to be able to shape our course for the diamonds. We found the remains of the vehicle as he had described it. It was obviously very old, the natives knew nothing of how it had come there, there was no vestige of path or spoor anywhere near--in fact, it seemed incredible that it should ever have been dragged there at all. But there it was, and, taking stock of the wild surroundings, we felt more certain than ever that we were hot on the scent. A huge ravine had been mentioned, deep-cut and profound. There, less than a mile away up the Molopo bed, showed the entrance to just such a place, deep and clear-cut in the sheer rock as though split out by the stroke of a giant axe. And the “strangely shaped mountain” to which it led, in the narrative? We turned as one man in the direction given in the book, and there, its crest well clear of the intervening foothills, was just such a hill. It appeared useless to traverse the ravine, for it must lead to the hill, and there was no need to follow the devious path taken by the first man. From the height on which we stood we could take compass bearings of that hill, and cut straight across country to it. The guides clucked and jabbered and intimated that it couldn’t be done, but we knew better--or thought we did; and it did not look more than five or six miles.