He knew each and every hoof-mark of his own eight charges even when they were mixed up with hundreds of others at the various water-holes, and he often pointed out the spoor of animals in the hard stony places that occasionally divided the dunes, and where the closest scrutiny of my own fairly good eyes showed me nothing. He was a source of perpetual interest to me, and taught me a good deal of veldt lore on that long trudge to the north. But our driver was by no means a pleasant man; he was a taciturn and bad-tempered individual who hated and despised all Englishmen and took little pains to conceal the fact, and within twenty-four hours of leaving Upington I was hard at work trying to keep the peace between him and my companion. The latter was a young Englishman, an accountant from Cape Town who had put in a good veldt apprenticeship in the B.B.P. in Rhodesia, and who, finding our driver would not be companionable, wanted to punch him. This I would have been very pleased to let him do thoroughly, but having left Upington, and with no other team or teamster to replace him, it would have been extremely bad policy. Moreover in some cases he was not at fault! For instance, G. was constantly accusing him of cruelty to his oxen, but this was only apparent, or in some cases necessary. G. wanted to push forward, as I did, and could not understand the arbitrary manner in which we trekked, outspanning in awful spots for hours in the sun without an atom of shade, pushing on in the dark when G. wanted to sleep, and above all stopping for hours in the night to sleep, and keeping the oxen tight-spanned in their heavy yokes. This “unnecessary cruelty,” as G. termed it, annoyed him so much that one night when we were all asleep he quietly let them loose, “so that they could have a good sleep, poor things,” as he put it. A few hours later, when inspan time came, there was trouble, for the “poor things” had cleared, some on the back trail for home, two old hands straight ahead to the next water-hole, and the rest due east into the real dunes of the forbidden Game Reserve, where there was an abundance of grass. The result was a day’s delay in retrieving them, and in future G. admitted the driver knew his own business best. Indeed, trekking in these deserts is an art in itself, bound by laws that are only known to men who know the roads intimately; and to attempt to trek a certain number of hours, and outspan a certain number of regular times, is out of the question. In the hottest time of the day, when the sand is almost red-hot, the oxen cannot and will not trek; then, whatever happens, at sunrise and sunset they must be loosed and rested for a while, and the problem is made more difficult by the necessity of finding grazing for them _en route_, and, above all, watering them. Much of our trekking was done at night, when oxen travel well, but this was a great drawback in many ways, as it left us ignorant of much of the country travelled through.