Cars were few and primitive in those days, and the roads we had to traverse were as primitive as the car. For a long time the owner of the map would not show it, or give more than a vague notion of where we were bound; but eventually Malmesbury and Eendekuil, then the terminus of the railway in that direction, were left behind; we climbed the difficult pass of “Pickaneer’s Kloof” and spent the first night dragging the rudimentary car through the sand-drifts below Macgregor’s Pass. We broke down hopelessly at red-hot little Clanwilliam, hearing to our dismay that there was another ahead on the same errand, and after maddening delay splashed on again, in pouring rain, through a terrible track leading to Van Ryn’s Dorp, along the steep mountain slopes skirting the Olifants River. The four days we allotted for the whole trip were taken up in reaching Van Ryn’s Dorp, a remote little village on the road to Namaqualand, and where our car created a mild sensation, for it was the first to be seen there. Away to the right of the dorp towered a magnificent isolated table-mountain, its reddish sides as sheer as gigantic walls. The sun was just setting, and I shall never forget the marvellous effect upon the huge buttresses of “Matsie-Kamma,” as the mountain is called, for the towering cliffs appeared as though turned into golden molten fire, whilst over it hovered a peculiar cloud, similar to the “Tablecloth” of Table Mountain. Behind ran a long escarpment of similar flat-topped mountains, and on them the glow was rapidly fading through a whole gamut of exquisite shades between crimson, mauve, heliotrope, and purple, till on them the sun had completely set, and they stood out a cold clear indigo against the cinnamon and green of the sky. But we had other things to think of besides mountains or sunsets: we wanted to get to our “diamonds.” The car could go no farther towards the coast, but a Cape cart could, and early next morning we were off again, and, toiling through an awful track, we slept that night at the “back of beyant,” the little mission station on the dreary sand-flats of Ebenezer. By this time we had forced the “discoverer” to disclose his map, and found we had to go to the mouth of the Olifants River, cross it to the barren, waterless, almost unknown and uninhabited coast north of it and find our way to a remote sealing-station some distance up that coast.