Luckily we were in no such case, but trundled comfortably along, doing our thirty-five or fifty miles a day, outspanning at night and sleeping under the cart, and getting seasoned for the real work of the desert farther north. On our right hand, most of the journey, ran a long line of barren hills; these denoted the course of the Orange River, which we left at Prieska and did not see again till we reached Upington. Altogether a most dreary and monotonous journey so far, and by no means the “joy-ride” we anticipated, the only pleasurable incident being when the surly driver sat on a scorpion by the camp fire one evening. However, at last the dreary stretches of sad-looking veldt, varied only by heavy sand, became broken by a few prominent granite kopjes, and eventually, on cresting a low stony ridge, we came in sight of the long winding belt of vegetation denoting the Orange River. On its far (northern) bank, white houses were dotted along in a thin straggling line; this was Upington. Beyond, as far as the eye could reach, stretched a vast, slowly rising, undulating expanse of sad, dun-coloured, featureless country, the southern dunes of the Kalahari, the “Great Thirst Land”--the land we were bound for, and in the wilds of which we hoped to find a fortune. Away to our left, westward and at a great distance, rose a line of jagged fantastic peaks, pale cobalt against the white glare of the sky; these peaks I had cause to know only too intimately later. They were the Noup Hills, an almost unexplored maze of low mountains situated below the Great Falls of the Orange and just on the border of German South-West, some seventy miles distant from us. Before reaching the very welcome river, however, we had to toil through a terrible “drift” of the softest, most powdery sand and silt that ever hampered a team even in this country of sand-drifts; it was a sort of sand-quagmire, in fact, if such a thing is imaginable, and in it the waggon sank up to the hubs, and progress was most maddeningly slow. This silt is really that brought down and spread out on either side of the river by successive floods, and is, wherever irrigated, most astonishingly fertile. Once through it, and amongst magnificent trees we came to the river, this most welcome oasis between two deserts; for the southern country is quite as well-deserving of the name as the true Kalahari of the northern bank. In flood-time it is a broad and noble stream with some magnificent stretches of water, often 400 yards or more in width, but at the time of our arrival it was low, and we were able to drive through its shallow _drifts_ and climb out on the north bank without recourse to the pontoon by which it is usually crossed. Along its bank’s summit runs the straggling street, knee-deep almost in Kalahari sand. A “hotel,” post and telegraph office, a church or two, and quite a number of large stores made the one street; these stores I found wonderfully