Here fresh troubles awaited the traveller. His oxen were dying of hunger and fatigue; his followers were discouraged; even his own resolution was shaken. But the shame of succumbing to surmountable difficulties,--of entertaining a base fear of dangers which other men had braved,--of returning, in fact, baffled and defeated to the Cape, urged him forward, and he accordingly struck his tents, and moved once more towards the north. Courage and intrepidity are of vast importance in every circumstance of life, in none more so than in the circumstances in which an African traveller is placed; but these virtues will not draw wagons, or silence the murmurs of the appetite when clamouring for food. Le Vaillant was prepared to endure, and he cheerfully abandoned his chariots in the desert when oxen were wanting to drag them along; but he abandoned at the same time much of that merchandise with which he was accustomed to purchase the friendship and aid of the savage, and from that moment all rational hope of traversing the whole continent, from the Cape of Good Hope to the Mediterranean, vanished. He continued his journey, however, from the laudable desire of performing what he could, though what he had projected might prove impracticable. Le Vaillant’s difficulties were far from being imaginary. Thirst, that most maddening of human privations, was now felt once more, and the parched herbage afforded neither nourishment nor cooling juices to the cattle. All their hopes now centred in those thunderstorms which, at certain seasons of the year, are common in southern Africa, and the jocular extravagance of Aristophanes, who represents men as cloud-worshippers, was now scarcely an exaggeration: for both our traveller and his followers almost bowed down in religious adoration to every cloud that sailed aloft in the blue firmament, and seemed to announce a tempest. At length vast masses of black vapour began to gather together in heaps over their heads, and to spread in sombre files along the sky. Flashes of lightning were perceived on the edge of the horizon; and all the forerunners of a storm successively presented themselves to their delighted senses.