After about a week of this we trekked back to our camp, where we revelled in _roster-kook_ and coffee and sugar, and compared notes with Telfer, who had tested several more pans north, as far as possible, without water. We had expected a Scotch cart with our next load of water, and the idea was to endeavour to get the oxen over as far as Aar Pan with a light load of stores, tools, etc.; but the waggon turned up without the smaller vehicle, and van Reenen and I decided to go back again, with as much as we could carry, and try to locate a big pan known by the Bushman name of “Koichie Ka,” near which was one of the pans where several diamonds had been picked up, whilst Telfer and Du Toit would come on with the cart a week later. I shall describe this trip somewhat in detail, as it was typical of what happened almost daily afterwards. We carried almost 60 lb., each taking flour, coffee, tools, etc., and made very heavy going of it to Aar Pan, where we made for a _wit boom_ tree we had discovered on the top of one of the big dunes, and worked till late cutting branches, and making a sort of shelter to which we added our waterproof sheets--for this time we came prepared for rain, and we got it. By ten at night it was coming down in sheets, and a terrific thunderstorm burst over us, keeping us busy till daylight trying to keep the water out and the fire in, and being pestered the whole time by van Reenen’s pet aversion, scorpions. This continued well into the following morning, when, as soon as it somewhat lifted, we made a cache of our stores in the tree, and started towards the far-distant pan Koichie Ka. About noon the sun came out, and the whole desert steamed. We passed for hours through nothing but miles of the beautiful flowers I have described, and then came to a patch of broken dunes where the vegetation was scantier, and where we saw more snakes in an hour than I had ever seen before. Presumably the rain had disturbed them, and they were now drying themselves; at any rate, there they were, almost at every step, principally big yellow and brown cobras; but one very striking and, to me, entirely new variety was a very light yellow chap with round spots of a brilliant scarlet speckled over him, exactly like spots of blood. They were in every good-sized bush, in the meer-cat burrows that honeycombed the hollows, coiled round the tufts of _toa_ grass--in fact, they swarmed. We had hoped to reach the big pan by nightfall, as there was a big krantz there where we could shelter; but it became evident that we could not do so, and we turned aside towards a small pan where a few bushes gave promise of a fire at least, for it became evident that we were in for rain again.