One of the most beautiful things in this wild region was the wonderful outcrops of rose and amethyst quartz to which I have already alluded, but which in the vicinity of the Bak River reached a profusion and a perfection I have seen nowhere else. Huge kopjes of this beautiful stone, of the most exquisite rose-colour, big reefs cropping out of the mountain slopes and in places crowning them, afforded a wonderful sight, especially when the early sun shone into their translucent depths. Since I first wandered there I have seen this beautiful semiprecious stone cut into jewellery, and sold in shops as “pink quartz,” but in the Noup Hills by the Bak River there is sufficient of it to build a town. A day or two before we abandoned the trip I had an adventure which might have proved more unpleasant than it did. Food was already very scarce, and one afternoon I took a shot-gun and went down the defile to where the Bak gorge ran into the Orange. Here the river was very wide, placid, and beautiful, and in the thick trees there were pheasants in plenty; but so thick was the vegetation that to flush them was next to impossible, and it was only after hours of walking and creeping through thick thorn, and the expenditure of the eight cartridges I had brought with me, that I got three pheasants. Of the others I had hit one or two hard, only to see them fall into the high and unclimbable thorn-trees, or into the river, and missed the rest. With my last shot I began to think about getting back to camp, and found that, absorbed in the pheasants, I had made my way upstream much farther than I had imagined. It was about sunset when I realised this, and night falls very suddenly in this region, so, getting clear of the thicket, I hurried campward. But the way was not only long but difficult, cut up with huge mullahs that had been worn in the deep silt of the banks, impeded by rocks and thick bush; and by the time I reached the Bak River gorge it was as near “pitch dark” as it ever is in Gordonia. Of course there was no mistaking the way, for once in the ravine it is almost impossible to get out of it; but the pitfalls and pot-holes in the ice-smooth granite are bad enough even in the daytime, and I blundered along through the thick bush of the lower end of the valley, cursing myself for being so late, and wondering how I should get on when I got to the really difficult bare and rocky part. Thought of any danger from leopards never entered my head, for though there was abundant evidence that the kloofs were full of them, and we knew that they had killed lots of natives thereabouts, they kept out of our way, and though we heard them all round us at times, we had not seen them.