From this huge, bare dune--the sand on the crest of which lay piled for the crowning 10 feet in an almost sheer wall--we had a fine panorama of the terrible waterless waste surrounding us, treeless, bare, and horrible in the glaring sun, awful in its featureless monotony of huge wave after wave of verdureless sand. Away south, in the far distance, we could see higher land near the coast, probably “Sylvia’s Heights,” and inland, faintest of faint cobalt against the glare, the outline of a long range of mountains, between which and the farthest distinguishable sand-dunes danced a lake of shimmering mirage, seldom absent in these wide spaces of the desert. Here and there, among the long ridges of the dunes, spaces could be noted which appeared to be covered with low bush, and towards one of these “pans” I made my way, whilst Du Toit struck out for a similar one in an opposite direction. The going was extremely difficult, for the dunes here lay in long parallel lines, very close together, very high and steep, and naturally with very deep corresponding valleys between; and my way lay across them. The distance appeared nothing, but each successive dune I climbed seemed to bring me no nearer the pan I was aiming for, and which was only visible for a second or two as I reached the crest of each big sand-wave. Anything more tedious than this crossing of the bare dunes it is impossible to imagine, though slower progress might conceivably be made in an attempt to cross a closely built city by climbing up, over and down the houses instead of using the streets.