About sunset we were lucky enough to find a few trees flanking one of these latter; and, making a wind-break of bushes and a big fire, we tried to make ourselves comfortable for the night. Luckily the spot was sandy, and we scooped a sort of bed in it that looked unpleasantly like a grave, and was within roasting distance of the fire; and with plenty of dry wood at arm’s reach, and my one blanket well tucked round me, I fell asleep almost immediately. I woke up about an hour later with my blanket smouldering on one side of me, whilst my other side was apparently frost-bitten. A wind had sprung up and was blowing sparks and embers all over me, whilst Sam snored peacefully and in safety on the other side. Whilst I was making new arrangements, I was startled by a man stepping into the firelight. He was a poor tatterdemalion of a Hottentot, clothed in nothing but a few rags, and literally blue with cold and famished with hunger. I woke the reluctant Sam, and he made a billy of coffee, part of which warmed the poor shivering wretch enough to enable him to talk. He spoke but a few words of Dutch, but Sam understood his “click” language and interpreted. He said he had been working for a prospecting party a long day’s trek to the north, but had “earned enough,” and was on his way back to Calvinia, where he belonged. He had expected to find _trek boeren_ at some old water-pits an hour or two north of where we were, but found the “pits” dry and the place deserted. And with the usual improvidence of a native, he had eaten all his food and drunk all his water before he got there, and would certainly have had a bad time had he not seen our fire. I questioned him about the prospecting party, who apparently were the men I had heard of in Van Ryn’s Dorp. “Yes,” he said, “they were looking for ‘blink klippers’ (bright stones) in a sand river, and finding them too, lots of them.” What with this piece of news, and the cold, and the dodging of sparks and embers made necessary by a change of wind about every half an hour, I rested very little that night. In the morning I gave the Hottentot a plug of tobacco and a little of our precious water, for he informed us we should find some about an hour farther on in the direction we were going, and he set out quite light-heartedly on his eighty-mile tramp “home.” He was literally “as he stood,” an old battered tin water-bottle appeared to be his only possession; but he had some money tied up in his rags, and offered to buy some more of my coveted plug _tabaki_, which I could not spare him.