Returning to the waggon, we found that the horses had arrived; they proved to be three dejected-looking native mares, _bosje kops_, and were accompanied by a foal and young colt. The whole cavalcade looked more fitted for the knacker’s yard than for hard work, and, knowing we should have to rely upon them solely as a means of transport when once we got among the mountains, I felt extremely dubious about them. However, nothing else was available, and we had to make the best of it; moreover, as events proved, they turned out wonderful little animals for the purpose we required. Meanwhile the waggon was entirely repacked, for we were now preparing to enter a very different country from the one already traversed. Every available water-barrel and utensil was filled, for henceforth we should have nothing to rely upon but a few precarious rain-water pools for our further supply until the maze of mountains before us was traversed and the Orange River again reached; whilst everything that could fall off, or out, was lashed, strapped, or otherwise secured to the waggon, in view of the awful boulder-strewn stream-beds and rocky tracks that would be our only roads. We trekked next day at noon, straight up the dry boulder bed of the Annis River, the sixteen mountain-bred oxen pulling as one beast and keeping the trek-tow taut in spite of the huge boulders that threatened to overturn it every moment. Then a ravine opened in the mountain flank, and we gladly turned up an incline deep in sand. Up this gradient we trekked for hours between high bare walls of sandstone, shale, and other sedimentary rocks, with numerous outcrops of barren-looking quartz. Winding steadily upwards, we outspanned about sunset on an open plateau covered with vegetation and studded with many of the queer-looking aloes known as _koker boomen_ or “quiver-trees,” and so named from the fact that the Hottentots and Bushmen at one time used the hollow bark of the branches as quivers. There were many kinds of euphorbia and fleshy-leaved plants of varieties new to me. In fact, these plateaux are in every way distinct from the plains from which we had climbed. Our driver was certainly bent on getting as much as possible out of his oxen, for that night late we trekked again across the plateau to where a gap in the peaks pointed to a pass up a steep climb where loose stones and boulders hurled the waggon from side to side, till every loose article in it was jumbled up in hopeless confusion, and it seemed that no wheels ever made could stand the terrific jolting; then over a _nek_, to plunge down a slope so steep that the tightly screwed brake scarcely kept the vehicle from taking charge and running over the oxen in front of it.