Thence we toiled through extremely heavy dunes, alternating with broad, flat stretches of hard shale, thickly strewn with stones that made our progress both difficult and painful. These stony spaces are known locally as _aars_, a name given to any feature on the surface which is long compared to its breadth, and the variety of water-worn stones with which they were strewn was astonishing. Fragments of igneous rock predominated, and conspicuous amongst them were many rounded fragments of a peculiar amygdaloid similar to that found near Pniel on the Vaal River, but by no means identical, the tiny steam-holes being filled with nodules of agate, chalcedony, and other forms of silica, or occasionally with a bright green mineral that I could not classify. Prominent also were numerous lumps of bright scarlet jasper, and the banded ironstone, usually associated with the diamond in the gravels of the River Diggings, was also here in abundance. This débris, however, though it is found spread over hundreds of miles of country, is usually a very superficial layer thinly strewn over the shale. Where it came from is difficult to imagine, as few of the rocks of which it is composed are to be found locally; but evidence seems to point to its having been brought there by huge floods in the remote past, and at a period prior to the advent of the enormous accumulation of sand that now forms the dunes of the desert and covers up the bulk of the “country rock” of this wide, waterless region. In the midst of these huge dunes, we one evening met a waggon belonging to a Boer who had for some time past been farming in German territory over the border, and as it was near outspan time we camped that night together. He had twenty-four sturdy oxen yoked to his buck-waggon, on which were piled his few household belongings and his numerous family. He had been one of the many “irreconcilables” who, having fought to the last in the Boer War, had refused to live under British rule, and had trekked to German West and there taken up land and settled down. And now, after years of galling and irksome submission to the German régime of red tape and officialism, he had been exasperated beyond all endurance by some sample of German “justice,” and was trekking back, extremely thankful to be once more under the once despised and hated Union Jack, and full of the wrongs experienced at the hands of the _Duitsers_. I met a number of these sadder and wiser men at various times along the border, and almost invariably their experiences of German rule had had a most salutary effect upon them, from a British point of view.