By the time we reached the vicinity of Aar Pan we were suffering rather badly; each stray melon we found had to go to the oxen, and it appeared doubtful whether we should be able to get them out with the cart. Most of the heavier samples were thrown away to lighten the load, but even so they could scarcely be got to drag the cart, and when we got to the huge dunes at Aar Pan we could get them no farther. We had seen thunder-showers falling in this direction, and had hoped that there might be water in the pits again, so Du Toit and myself took a billy-can and some cord and hastened across the dunes, leaving John to watch the exhausted cattle. I said to Du Toit, “In any case there is bound to be a little in the deep pit, enough for us! Animals can’t reach it there.” “But the puff-adder! Did van Reenen kill it outright?” “The bullet cut it nearly in half. It would be sure to get into its hole in the rock to die!” Du Toit thought otherwise. “If it could crawl at all it would go to the water--and if it died in it, the water will be _giftig_ (poisonous).” I stuck to the opinion that the snake would have died in its hole--the wish being father to the thought--for I was half dead with thirst. But it needed no canful of water to show that I was wrong, for the stench that rose from that pit was too awful for words, and I could not face it long enough even to peer down. But Gert told me that the bloated body of the big snake lay almost wholly in the water, of which, by a strange irony of fate, there was quite a large pool in the pit, enough, had it been drinkable, to have satisfied not only ourselves, but the oxen. So that the puff-adder had a grim revenge for van Reenen’s bullet. There was no water whatever in the other pit, and there was nothing to do but to struggle through to the waggon, which we did by abandoning the cart and with the loss of two of the oxen _en route_. We found t’samma there almost exhausted, and a day or two afterwards were forced to retreat again to the Molopo. Here, after revelling a day or two in good water, we separated, van Reenen and Telfer to enter the Reserve still farther south, whilst I made an attempt to reach the far north-eastern pan known as “Wolverdanse,” where emeralds were supposed to exist, and which Telfer had searched for in vain. From the heights of a pan known as “Kei Koorabie,” which we had reached on our last trip, John the Bastard had pointed out this “emerald pan” on the far horizon to the north, a long blue ridge of a very distinctive shape; but we had realised that the only way to reach it was by striking south from the Kuruman River. [Illustration: TEACHING CAMELS TO EAT T’SAMMA.] [Illustration: BUSHMAN AT BOOMPLAATS, SOUTHERN KALAHARI. With native musical instrument.]