From this spot we worked a few days eastward, locating a number of pans, in one of which we found extremely promising yellow ground, and we determined to bring tools, etc., to Aar Pan, and make an effort to properly test some of these places, especially as we found that more rain had fallen in this locality, and that the t’samma, which would make us independent of water, would soon be big enough to use. On this part of the trip, to enable us to cover long distances, we cut our equipment down to the very lowest: a rifle, twenty-five cartridges, knife, compass, matches, etc., and a quart water-bottle, carrying absolutely no food or cooking utensils. We used to shoot a steenbok, cook the liver and kidneys on sticks over the fire, and the head in the ashes for breakfast, and bury the legs in the embers till they were roasted dry, and sling the meat on to our belt. No bread, occasionally salt--from a pan--a big enough salt-cellar for a glutton! Occasionally we found a few tiny berries that the Bushmen eat, but mostly these are aromatic and bitter, and as there are poisonous varieties much resembling them, we usually left them severely alone. Spiny cucumbers were also beginning to appear, mostly intensely bitter, but also eaten by the Bushmen. In this region, too, the grass was very luxuriant, and would have provided food for thousands of cattle, without deprivation to the huge flocks of gemsbok that wandered over it. Many of these wide “desert” stretches were extremely beautiful, being covered for miles with tall, thickly growing flowers, a species of campanula something like a fox-glove, growing to a height of three or four feet, and of beautiful and vivid colours of great variety. The scent of these vast parterres was faintly sweet in the daytime, but during the night it became almost overpowering, and I was told by Old Gert that Bushmen have a great objection to sleeping among them, believing that to do so means never to wake. During the whole of our trip, so far, since we had left the border and entered the Reserve, we had seen no human being, nor even a spoor, but on the edge of one of these eastern pans we now discovered the remains of a recent Bushman camp, the small shelters of interwoven branches being simply constructed to afford a little shade during the hottest part of the day. They had apparently been gone only a day or two, trekking eastward, and the remains of full-grown t’samma showed that the fruit was already to be found in that direction. The little desert Ishmaels had probably seen our fires, and scented the presence of the white man, as I put it to van Reenen. He looked me up and down and said, “Well, yes! the wind’s been blowing from our direction!” It is quite true that you cannot have many baths out of a quart of water a day, but I think he might have put it differently.