The dryness of the country was now really alarming; all the watering-places that remained were crowded with cattle, and every blade of grass within miles of them was being eaten off. Over a great part of Damara-land rain had not fallen more than ten times during the whole rainy season; and a mortality from actual starvation had already begun among the cattle, and the year will probably be remembered and named by the Damaras as that of the great drought. It was therefore no easy matter for me to travel about; but I had one advantage on my side, which was, that on the road, when far away from watering-places and the grazing limits of the cattle by them, I often found grass, and there I outspanned to sleep, and let the oxen feed, then travelling on in the morning I came to the next watering-place at the middle of the day, when the cattle of the natives were all sent off to the fields, and the wells were disengaged. I thus ensured an evening’s meal to the oxen, and also one in the early morning, if they chose to eat it, and water in the middle of the day, but no more. On the road to Jonker we found hardly any grass, and I do not know how I should have been able to keep my cattle at his place, if it were not that a valley was left unoccupied, owing to a superstitious feeling arising from a cattle-watcher having been lately murdered there by the Damaras. Jonker received me very kindly, and I expressed to him how glad I was to hear of the excellent manner in which he had kept order among his people during my absence. He had, I knew, been put to very great trouble in doing so, as the disposition to pillage is general among the Hottentots, and requires a far more despotic ruler to repress than Jonker or anybody else in this republican part of the world is allowed to be. I found a man settled here who was of great use to me, and whom I engaged; he was white, and born in the Cape; spoke English and Dutch perfectly, and was brought by the missionaries here as half-carpenter, half-schoolmaster. He, however, did not suit them, and had for a long time been dismissed their service; I found him installed as Jonker’s prime minister. He spoke Hottentot very fairly, and had a winning manner about him that vastly smoothed down the minor difficulties of my way; and though he was always getting himself and us into scrapes, yet he had a marvellous faculty of creeping out of them again. Eybrett, for that was his name, undertook to guide me to Elephant Fountain, a deserted station on the northern frontier of Amiral’s tribe. No waggon had passed that road for years, and the way led along a country which was rarely travelled over, owing to its being a border district between the Damaras and Namaquas.