our teeth gone through living on t’samma (its worst effect), and altogether as desperate-looking a gang of tramps as ever graced the north-west border; but we were happy, for there was going to be an end of poverty--we had found the pipes! Moreover we had thousands of feet of entirely novel bioscope films--the Great Falls of the Orange, the actual pans in the heart of the desert, Bushmen hunting, dancing, preparing t’samma; the huge nests of the “social bird” with their swarming inhabitants: in short, enough new “pictures” alone to repay us for the trip, even without the diamonds. For not one of the party was pessimistic enough to imagine for a moment either that the Government would refuse to allow us a chance of opening up a water-route to the pipes, or that the intense heat of the desert had--in spite of all precautions--utterly spoilt every foot of our films. CHAPTER XVIII TRIP IN SEARCH OF “EMERALD VALLEY”--FEVER AND FAILURE--BACK TO GORDONIA--SECOND TRIP TO BAK RIVER--“SOME GUN!”--THE PACK-COW--SURLY NATIVES--“ROUGHING IT.” One of our greatest disappointments in the Kalahari had been our failure to reach the pan of “bright green stones,” which we believed to be emeralds, and when on my return to Cape Town I found a man awaiting me who claimed to have found a rich deposit of them in Portuguese East Africa, I decided to fill in the time of waiting the Government’s decision as to my desert discoveries by making a dash for “Emerald Valley.” Rumour as to the existence of this valley has for many years been current amongst prospectors and mining men in the Barberton district, and many a man has heard the tale in Johannesburg. It is alleged that a party of Boers, hunting on the Portuguese side of the Lebombo Mountains, which form the boundary between Portuguese territory and the North-Eastern Transvaal, came upon some ancient workings which they failed to penetrate, owing to noxious gas; but that at the mouth of one they found skeletons, and with the bones a small skin bag full of rough emeralds. They got away with the stones, which fetched a large sum in Europe, but for some unexplained reason were never able to reach the spot again.