At Van Ryn’s Dorp I heard the encouraging (or disquieting) news that a very finely equipped expedition had passed through a few days before, going north after diamonds, which they professed to have found on a previous trip. I therefore obtained a small donkey-waggon and team, with a coloured driver and two boys, and pushed on to Zout River, a stream running from the direction of Little Bushmanland into the Olifants, and on the banks of which some years previously a fine diamond had been found. The exact spot was at the bridge over which ran the lonely but important road to Namaqualand and the north, and from this spot my actual prospecting began. And from the first I had interest of the most absorbing: for if there is any country in the world where encouraging prospects may be found, it is in that same north-west region. The stream facilitated prospecting, it was crystal-clear, and with abundant water; but unfortunately, as the name implies, it was salt, salt as brine and undrinkable even for the donkeys! All along its banks there were “indications” of minerals, and all alike proved to be but “indications.” Heavy gravel led to my washing systematically all along its beds for diamonds, and finding promising but baffling results in the sieve. Using a prospecting-pan for possible gold gave me similar results: here and there a tiny yellow “tail” at the end of the pan showed that gold had been there, but all efforts to trace it to its matrix failed. Copper there was in abundance, though in small and isolated occurrences; here and there grains of tin showed among the black titaniferous iron-sands of the river: and iron and galena were everywhere. In fact, so multitudinous were these various “indications,” and so barren of tangible result was the following-up of any and all of them, that I began to realise that the description that had been applied to the north-west as being the “Land of Mineral Samples” was not much exaggerated! Still, day after day I worked along towards the Olifants, finding my results getting poorer and my water getting shorter every day. The whole region was most bewildering; it was as though the waste from a big assayer’s laboratory had been dumped all along that stream, and none of the “samples” found led to anything but a big note of interrogation. At last, in a tiny side-stream, I found some minute nuggets of gold, and my hopes rose; moreover, a native “herd” whom I chanced to come across told me that a big white reef ran right across this same stream a few miles up, and that he had always heard there was “goud” in it. So I abandoned my laborious panning and struck up the stream, and found a wide quartz reef just as he had described, but no trace was there of gold in it.