At length the bare dunes ended abruptly, grass and bushes appeared again, and here and there Du Toit was able to pluck a tiny shoot of young sorrel to chew, which gave us some small relief from what was now torture. Then came a small _gar boom_ tree, its scanty greyish leaves full of long bean-like pods on which buck feed greedily, and capable of giving us a modicum of shade. We threw ourselves down, panting and anxious. Du Toit, however, made for the first prominent dune we had seen for hours, and, climbing it, brought us the welcome news that the Salt Pan was barely a mile away. So we shuffled on again, and at three o’clock stood on its margin. It was truly a wonderful sight--circular in form, a mile or more in diameter, and covered with salt as pure and white as the driven snow. Across it, and adding to its striking resemblance to a snow-clad Canadian lake, lay the spoors of gemsbok and other large animals, the recent ones showing as black as ink, for the salt is but a few inches deep, and underlying it is a thick black mud. Into this the poor tortured dogs dug their noses--it was cool, but pure brine--and with their tails between their legs and howling dismally they crawled back to the sand and bush. Meanwhile, in spite of our plight, the wide expanse of clean salt had proved as irresistible to us as a clean stretch of sea sand usually does to schoolboys or “cheap trippers,” and we scraped our initials deep into the black mud, till the lettering stood out as clearly as black type upon white paper. Van Reenen wished to cool his burning feet in the wet brine, but was dissuaded, and, separating, we searched the margin of the pan for a sign of the pits spoken of by the Hottentots. But we found no vestige of them, though on the southern margin we found the old waggon-path, plainly visible owing to its thick covering of _toa_ grass, but useless to us, as it led south-west towards “Aar Pan,” whilst our camp and water lay north-west. The big dune at Aar Pan loomed up temptingly; it did not appear more than an hour’s walk, and remembering the thunder-clouds and apparent rainfall we had seen in that direction, we were for a moment tempted to make for it, but sanity prevailed--for to have gone there and found no water would have meant death; as we afterwards found, the distance between the Salt Pan and the water-pit there took a good four hours to negotiate.