With an occasional brief outspan, we trekked all afternoon, evening, and throughout the night, for the drivers were most anxious to reach our camping-place before the sun gained power the following morning, and with the exception of a precarious perch now and again on the waggon, we walked the whole time. Towards morning the steep and difficult dunes came to an end, and we entered a _straat_ a hundred yards or more in width, and trending in the right direction. Here the going, after the switchbacking of the previous twelve hours, was easy and pleasant, and we climbed thankfully into the waggon, and had just fallen asleep, when a chorus of yells and shrieks and the waggon coming to a standstill woke us all up again. Rauchtenbach’s waggon with the water-supply, which had been leading, had crashed into a big ant-bear hole and overturned, and one hogshead lay broached with all its precious contents spilt in the thirsty sand, whilst several of the smaller tanks were badly battered and leaking. We lit fires of dry _toa_ grass, outspanned the oxen, and all hands had to turn to and worked hard till daybreak before we salved the rest of our precious water and were ready to trek again; and the sun was high in the heavens, and both the oxen and ourselves about played out, when, after negotiating a few lines of extremely steep and difficult dunes, we came upon a small pan from which stretched a broad straight _straat_ leading due east, and which was the spot Rauchtenbach had recommended as a camp. His judgment had not been at fault, for the position was admirable. He had gauged the capabilities of the oxen to a nicety, for it was quite obvious that they could not have dragged the waggons farther with a reasonable chance of getting back to water; the _straat_ was open and of firm sand, in which tents could be pitched without fear of being blown away; there was an abundance of dry firewood in the shape of old tree-stumps all along the ridges of the flanking dunes, and the small pan showed traces of having held water, and in the event of rain would hold it again. And, best of all, in the immediate vicinity was an exceptionally high dune, from which we were able to distinguish several of the larger pans eastward, and which would form a most useful landmark as to our camp’s whereabouts when we wandered far afield. There was grass in profusion--dry, but still good food for the cattle, and barely three dunes’ distance north we found a tract of sand where a heavy shower had fallen some time before, and where the t’samma was already beginning to bloom.