Here we had to send the donkeys a full day’s journey away for water and grazing, and had to fill our water-barrel periodically from the same place, and here--although in a comfortable camp--my luck was no better than lower down the river. Samples of all sorts, “indications” in abundance, and nothing more. Along these upper reaches, however, I found many masses of a ferruginous gravel hardened almost into conglomerate and containing a small portion of gold, but in no case sufficient to pay for working in such a remote region. These gravels are in appearance identical with certain Australian gravels which are both gold and gem bearing, and may probably have been the source of the diamond that had been found lower down, and of the gold I saw traces of. During the three weeks that I had been out, thus far, I had seen but one solitary human being except my two “boys,” the herd who had told me of the gold reef; for, although but a day’s ride from Van Ryn’s Dorp, the region is a very solitary and deserted one, much of the land being _brak_ (alkaline) and unfit for stock to run on. So that the life, though not without interest, was a very lonely as well as a very hard one; so cold were the nights that the two blankets I had brought utterly failed to keep me warm even when I turned in “all standing,” and I soon abandoned my canvas camp-stretcher for a warmer lair on the ground itself. Then at daybreak, Sam, the elder of the “boys,” would make coffee, and with a hurried snack of food we would start off for the day, carrying pick, shovel, sieve, and pan, and food and water for midday. Thus I tried the whole of the adjacent country systematically, sieving the grounds in the stream-bed and “gravitating” them (a diamond-digger’s trick) when water was sufficient, or using the prospecting-pan for the purpose of finding traces of gold or other metals. When water failed, or the “indications” occurred far from it, small portions of the concentrates of sand and gravel would be bagged and tied up and labelled separately, the same applying to samples of rock taken from various parts or depths of a reef. All these samples had in any case to be carried back to water, and, in the case of rock, to camp, where each portion had to be carefully pounded into the finest powder by pestle and mortar before it could be tested for the mineral it might contain--hard and laborious work, varied by drilling holes in hard rock for dynamite charges, or “gravitating” concentrates in ice-cold water till the brine cracked the hands and caused most painful sores. Then, the day’s work over, sunset would often find us miles from camp, and we would trudge back, and load ourselves up with dry wood for the night’s fire, and feel too tired to attempt to cook.