And along that most disappointing beach we searched day after day, always hoping and expecting to find, and always in vain. We tried the larger-graded pebbles farther from the water first, hoping for Cullinans or at least Koh-i-noors, and by degrees we worked down to the water’s edge, where the grit was but little coarser than that of Luderitzbucht; but all to no avail. We sank prospecting-pits 5 or 6 feet in depth at regular intervals, always finding the same promising material, always getting the same disappointing result. We turned over the big stones by hand, we “gravitated” the small stuff by sieve, as we had learnt to do years before; there were no diamonds there. The sun flayed us, for the heat during the day was terrific, and the nights were correspondingly cold and damp with the heavy sea-fog, that came down always towards morning. We grudged ourselves time for food and sleep, so obsessed were we with the idea that the diamonds _must_ be there somewhere. Moreover, the little food we did get was of bad quality, and the water abominable. A good deal of knocking about South Africa had inured me to drinking bad water--alkaline, stagnant, full of animalcules, etc.--but this stuff was different, and I soon found that Jim had been right when he had protested that the coffee-pot was not generally used for seal oil. It was not the pot that the taste came from, it was the water itself. Every beaker, every cask, every drum, every utensil was impregnated with oil, there was absolutely no getting away from it. And yet so soaked in the same unctuous, all-pervading liquid were the three sealers that they could not taste it; in fact, they could not understand my own and Du Toit’s repugnance to drinking it, in the least! But to me, as water, this liquid was quite undrinkable, as coffee I swallowed it with an effort and kept it down with a greater one, and as tea I never had the pluck to try it more than once. One morning, after an exceptionally heavy fog, a drop or two of water percolating through the bucksail and falling on my nose not only awakened me, but gave me a brilliant idea. “What an ass!” I thought, as I jumped up there and then. “Why, I could have had a pint or two of rain-water every day had I thought of it!” I cleared out with a dipper and pail, and sure enough there was quite a pint of water caught in the slack of the sail. And I scooped it out, and raked the embers together, and put my own tin “billy” on to boil and promised myself a cup of tea made with pure water, not oil! And I went and woke Du Toit and told him, and he came and sat by the fire to watch me brew it. Of course we’d no milk, but we had sugar, and I poured out two “beakers” (enamelled mugs) of it, and set them to cool. Du Toit was in a hurry; he blew his. “Smells good,” he said, and took a big gulp.