In spite of its comparative importance as the customs “port” for the southern trade-routes, this post at Nakob was one of the loneliest, most isolated habitations in South Africa. It was simply a little shanty of corrugated iron so small as to barely afford shelter for the three troopers stationed there, and who, having no stable, tethered their horses amongst the thorn-trees near by. South of them stretched the wild country I have described, the Noup Hills and Bak River, with not a single inhabitant for the whole difficult day’s ride to the Orange, and more days beyond it. North of them, and wellnigh fifty miles away, was the similar post of Obopogorop where two other troopers were marooned, and thence a similar stretch of awful dune country had to be crossed to reach Rietfontein--the northern post of the camel police which I have already described, and where there were about a dozen men. This represented the whole police force guarding (?) the long desert frontier of Gordonia and German South-West Africa--less than twenty men isolated and separated from each other by great distances of desert and difficult country, in many places cumbered by huge dunes of loose sand, through which transport was impossible, and which rendered long detours necessary. And these difficult, devious, and waterless paths were the only means of communication between them, for neither telephone nor telegraph-wire existed! Between them and their headquarters at Upington stretched a good eighty miles also of wellnigh uninhabited country, whilst their nearest store was at Zwartmodder, a tiny place in the bed of the Molopo, forty miles due east, and therefore that distance from the border. Except for a few miserable Hottentot _pondhoeks_ and the mud houses of a couple of Bastards, there were no other inhabitants of this important boundary post. They had got water in a well at a little distance from the post, and I soon found that my sphere of action would be limited to a radius within reach of this water, for there was none other for a very great distance in either direction. A few days after my arrival I was snugly encamped some miles north of the police post, and within a stone’s throw of German territory, my tents being pitched in a deep ravine running into an escarpment of higher land. These deep, abrupt ravines honeycombed the country in all directions, and in them there was a certain amount of vegetation, though the surface of the plateau or tableland above was principally a stone-strewn wilderness over which one could ride for days without seeing a human being or the trace of one. One of these ravines was, I found, the upper part of the Bak River, in which I had discovered my indications farther south; and within a few days I had confirmed my original conviction that hereabouts was the source of the Kimberlite I had found. Much of the country was hidden by a huge accumulation of sand, but on the higher land I soon found, not one but a whole group of pipes.