According to the skipper the beach he knew of lay about three or four miles down the coast, but this was the only safe landing-place and anchorage, and here we must camp. So we got our water and provisions ashore, and by the aid of a big bucksail and some driftwood we made a shelter to live and sleep in. This driftwood lay in abundance all along the sandy, desolate shore, and served excellently for fuel, though it was too dry and rotten to be of much service for anything else. The landing even of our few stores and belongings took up the best part of the day, and we decided not to make our first trip to our diamond beach till the morning; but just before sunset Du Toit and I went a short distance inland to where the first high dunes began, and climbed a prominent one for a look-round. And east, north, and south there was nothing but sand; not a tree anywhere, only here and there a stunted bush struggling forlornly against adversity; nothing but bare waves, mounds, and ridges of desolate dunes as far as the eye could reach, and to the west the equally (but not more) desolate ocean. No sign of life anywhere except a few gulls over the sea, though on our way back a jackal followed but a few paces behind, full of curiosity at the strange beings the like of whom he had probably never seen before. We saw several of these jackals during our stay there, and they were all quite fearless. Their spoors and those of the _stronte woolfe_, or brown hyena, were numerous, and the only spoors of any kind to be seen along the desolate shore, where these creatures probably picked up a precarious living from the dead fish occasionally stranded there. A short distance up the coast we found a flat space where the sand was comparatively hard, and where, apparently, in the past a shallow lagoon had existed. Here there were a few straggling bushes, thick-leaved and resinous, and scanty clumps of a sort of strong, wiry rush seemed to point to moisture at a short distance below the surface. Here, too, we found huge heaps of the shells of a species of large limpet, shell middens showing that at one time a people existed in the locality, probably the _strand looper_, the beach-roaming forerunner of both Bushman and Hottentot. But except for the shells, no vestige of him remained, nor of the water that he at one time drank at, though probably a few feet dug in the sand might have laid that bare.