The Hottentots are miserably poor; they depend upon a few poor flocks and herds for a living, together with a precarious harvest which want of rain cheats them of. Year after year their scanty corn-lands on the slopes of the mountain, where rain is most likely to fall, have been ploughed and sown, and a promising crop has again and again sprung up, only to wither and die for want of rain long before reaching maturity. This had happened time after time at the period when I first visited the place, until no corn remained for the people to sow, the seed having been eaten to keep them from starving. There was no work in the district, the supply being greatly in excess of the only demand, namely that of the C.C.C., and present conditions rendering it almost impossible for “outside” mining ventures to work the many known mineral deposits in the vicinity at a profit. The rain had evidently been widespread, and its fall relieved me of the anxiety I had felt about the scarcity of water on my coming trip, for which I was now able to make final arrangements. My visit had been timed to coincide with the missionary’s periodical trip to the remote mission station of Kuboos, in Richtersfeldt, where once a year the nomad Hottentots forming that community gather for _nachtmaal_, and this would be the most favourable opportunity for meeting the guides I needed. All being arranged, I returned to Port Nolloth, where I met S. Ransson, my companion for the trip, a tough and seasoned prospector whose recent two years on the diamond-fields of German South-West had turned him into a sort of salamander, with a hide like biltong, and a positive liking for a diet largely consisting of sand and “brak” water. With him came the whole cargo of stores necessary for such a long trip, for we had been warned that the country we were going into was practically a land of famine. The few inhabitants--Hottentots and Bastards of the Richtersfeldt Mission-lands--are wretchedly poor, practically existing upon the milk of their few cows and goats; they very rarely slaughter an animal, and are very reluctant even to sell one; they grow nothing whatsoever except a few patches of corn on the mountain-tops near Kuboos, the harvest of which, when they are lucky enough to reap one, is only sufficient to last them a few months; and when milk fails and grain is finished they exist upon a few edible roots and the gum of the thorn-trees growing on the banks of the Orange River. And as we expected to employ a fair number of these natives, and would have to feed them, it came about that, roomy as the waggon proved, its capacity was taxed to the utmost, and its team of sixteen sturdy oxen had plenty of collar-work before they got through the belt of heavy sand that stretches for miles inland from the sea.