It is seldom very dark on the wide spaces of the veldt, but the night was of inky blackness, and rain threatened in all directions; and as we huddled up under the shelter of a big rock the wind swept howling round us, chilling us to the very bone. Occasionally a few drops of rain fell, but luckily the threatened storm kept off, and after an interminable period of fitful naps, punctuated by an occasional tramp up and down to warm our half frozen limbs, the bright “morning star” that heralds the dawn rose and showed cheerily through the lightening clouds. Still, it seemed an endless time to daybreak, and all my attempts to cheer myself with visions of a possible Golconda to reward me brought me but scant comfort. With morning, cold, bleak, and cheerless as a bad November day in Europe, we started up the sand river, finding almost immediately large masses of rock garnet and countless quartz crystals, bright, glittering, but of course quite valueless. And though I put in a long, thirsty day, till well on in the afternoon, searching and sieving, not a particle of anything else did I find to warrant the “diamondiferous” reputation of that wretched valley. Meanwhile I had sent Sam with our water-bottles to a kloof he knew of a couple of hours’ journey away, where he had found water on a previous visit; and late in the afternoon he returned with sufficient to make a billy of coffee, for the fuel for which he brought a small bundle of laboriously collected twigs. As I had seen quite enough of this “Sindbad’s Valley” by this time, we struck out for home, not following our previous route, but striking straight across more open country to the north-west. Except that we found sufficient wood before dark to make a fire that lasted only long enough to tantalise us (and make us feel colder than ever, afterwards!), this night was a replica of the previous one, and I determined that, if I had to spend another night on the veldt, I would at all costs make for a spot where wood was to be found, if such were possible. However, late that afternoon, and when we were still a good ten miles or more of rough country from our camp, Sam climbed one of the isolated granite kopjes that form such a feature of that part of Klein Namaqualand and Little Bushmanland, and yelled out that he could see a “house.” It turned out to be the canvas “house” of a trek Boer, who, with his small flock of sheep and a few oxen, had pitched his portable residence at some old abandoned pits that a lucky shower had partly filled with water, and near which, at the foot of a big kopje, we found enough wood to keep us fairly warm that night.