Mr. Kling, the missionary, arrived that night, and the following morning Ransson and I set out to visit his waggon, about half a mile from our own. Although waggons, carts, and huts had considerably increased in numbers since our arrival, not a soul was to be seen, and the missionary’s waggon was likewise deserted; but from a huge erection of fresh bushes that I took to be a sort of cattle kraal I could hear voices. There appeared to be only two people speaking; first would come a brief emphatic sentence in Dutch, then a reply in clicking Hottentot. To my limited intelligence it sounded as though Mr. Kling was sharply interrogating a native on some point, but, on strolling round the large and high enclosure to look for an entrance, we came suddenly upon line after line of kneeling Hottentots, silently and attentively listening. The “kraal,” in fact, was a temporary chapel hastily built of bushes and filled to overflowing with devout natives, men on one side and women on the other, whilst at the far end, by an extempore altar, stood the missionary and a native in clerical attire, who was rapidly translating Mr. Kling’s address into the vernacular, sentence by sentence, and apparently with force and effect. I’ll own we tried to bolt, but Mr. Kling called us, and we had perforce to walk up and sit by his side in our shirt-sleeves, facing four or five hundred pairs of curious eyes. White men are a rarity in the Richtersfeldt, but surely not sufficiently so to account for the intense fixity with which these people regarded me? Ransson, whom I consider much more of a natural curiosity than I am myself, they appeared to ignore; every pair of eyes seemed to be riveted on me! For a moment I felt flattered, then I tumbled! They had never seen a _bald_ white man before. Ransson told me afterwards that a ray of sunlight, filtering through the bush roof, struck right on the top of my cranium, and was reflected as though from a mirror; he also said they probably thought it was a halo I was wearing. But as he also spread the quite unfounded yarn as to his having found a hen ostrich sitting on my head one morning when we were sleeping in the desert, and evidently taking it for a long-lost egg, I think his statement can be ignored.