They were frowsy and filthy and poverty-stricken to a degree, and in a weak moment, having pity on one poor old bundle of rags who was carrying a baby and seemed hardly able to get along, I motioned her to get up on the waggon box, and later, when two or three pot-bellied little imps clambered up beside her, I hadn’t the heart to turn them off. Then--it being late afternoon of a terrifically hot day, and the waggon going smoothly through the soft sand--I stretched out and fell asleep for a bit. My dreams were interrupted by a terrific blow on the nose, and I awoke with a yell to find a small but extremely odoriferous youngster sprawling across my face, having fallen from a perch which he had evidently taken up on our piled-up belongings behind us; each box or bag or sieve was occupied by others: one of them had on my new pith helmet and nothing else--the whole waggon, in fact, was filled and festooned and overflowing with them. On the box-seat now sat four frowsy old hags smoking, spitting, and clucking like a barnyard full of hens, whilst the atmosphere...! A sudden jolt of the waggon threw another youngster across Ransson’s _embonpoint_--much to my gratification--but he merely snored a bit louder. I, however, felt myself quite unequal to the occasion or the odour, and scrambling out of the waggon, I gave them best and walked. We outspanned in the middle of the track, the native drivers on these lonely treks seldom troubling to draw aside from the beaten path. Glorious are these Namaqualand nights, the soft, velvety blackness of the seemingly limitless veldt, above the great solemn blinking stars, looking double the size they appear through the denser atmosphere of the South, and making one feel very small and wormlike. There is an abundance of fuel in the shape of dry bush almost everywhere in Namaqualand, and that first night of our trek our fire blazed brightly nearly the whole night, the natives huddling near it and clucking and cackling in their extraordinary “click” language, men, women, and quite small children passing from mouth to mouth the native-made soapstone pipes, filled with their loved _tabaki_. These pipes are peculiarly shaped, being a straight tube like a very large cigar-holder, and often the more primitive natives simply use the hollow shin-bone of buck or sheep.