He told me that a toast I had heard in the hotel was being drunk all over the German Empire, and that every officer longed for the war. “It means their chance, it means promotion to them,” he explained; “your Empire is declining, it has seen its day; and now comes Germany’s.” We parted perfectly good friends, and I certainly preferred his impudent frankness to the scowls and surly demeanour of most of his compatriots. Returning to Swakopmund, we caught the _Frieda Woermann_ back to Luderitzbucht, and in that comfortable little liner had a very different trip from the one we had experienced in Jim’s cutter. At that time the skipper of this well-known coast boat was an enormously fat man, and his chief engineer was built on the same lines, and it was a standing joke, whenever they happened to appear on deck together, for the passengers to rush in mock panic to the opposite side of the ship, with the avowed intention of balancing her and keeping her from capsizing. But they were a very harmless, good-natured old pair, and played scart interminably. Luderitzbucht was still prospecting-mad, but apparently no new discoveries had been made of any great importance, and new regulations were being promulgated at such a rate, and such restrictions were being placed upon diggers and prospectors, that men were beginning to leave the country. So frequent and so contradictory had been these new regulations, that it had often happened that men who had been absent on a pegging expedition for a week or two would return to find that the new laws rendered all their work useless. In short, there appeared very little scope for us there; and after one or two abortive trips to spots we had heard of, and which we found to be useless or already pegged, we decided to return to British territory. We were strengthened in this resolve by what we heard from a relative of Du Toit’s: a certain Stuurmann, who had been in German employ during the whole of the Hottentot rebellion, and was one of the many Dutch transport-drivers living in the Boer camp just outside Luderitzbucht. This chap had at one time followed the Orange River from its mouth up to the Great Falls, and the account he gave of certain spots on its banks, and notably of huge stretches of gravel near the Great Fish River mouth, made us all eagerness to get there as soon as possible. The description of these gravels tallied, it is true, with the blank patches we had gone so far after, but in this case, we argued, they were near that possible source, the Vaal River Diggings; and though we had followed similar patches in vain from Prieska down to below the Great Falls, there remained this 150 miles of the almost unknown lower reaches, and they had always appealed to us!