Sebele, the heir apparent, does all the executive work of the country now, and the old man is left at home to chew his sugar-cane and smoke his pipe. Around the villages and in the hollow below the native gardens or fields are very fertile; maize, kaffir corn, sugar-cane, grow here in abundance, and out of the tall reeds black women came running to look at us as we passed by, whose daily duty it is at this season of the year to act as scarecrows, and save their crops from the birds. Beneath the corn and mealies they grow gourds and beans, and thereby thoroughly exhaust the soil, which, after a season or two, is left fallow for a while; and if the ground becomes too bad around a town they think nothing of moving their abodes elsewhere, a town being rarely established in one place for more than fifty years. From Sechele’s town to Khama’s old capital, Shoshong, is a weary journey of over a hundred and thirty miles through the Kalahari Desert, and through that everlasting bush of mimosa thorn, which rose like impenetrable walls on either side of us. Along this road there is hardly any rising ground; hence it is impossible to see anything for more than a few yards around one, unless one is willing to brave the dangers of penetrating the bush, returning to the camp with tattered garments and ruffled temper, if return you can, for when only a few yards from camp it is quite possible to become hopelessly lost, and many are the stories of deaths and disappearances in this way, and of days of misery spent by travellers in this bush without food or shelter, unable to retrace their steps. The impenetrableness of this jungle in some places is almost unbelievable: the bushes of ‘wait-a-bit’ thorn are absolutely impossible to get through; every tree of every description about here seems armed by nature with its own defence, and lurking in the grass is the ‘grapple plant,’ the Harpagophytum procumbens, whose crablike claws tear the skin in a most painfully subtle way. The mimosas of many different species which form the bulk of the trees in this bush are also terribly thorny; the Dutch call them camel thorns, because the giraffes, or, as they call them, the camel leopards, feed thereon. Why the Dutch should be so perverse in the naming of animals I never can discover; to them the hyæna is the wolf, the leopard is the tiger, the kori-bustard is the peacock, and many similar anomalies occur.