The corporal who was in charge of them slouched to us from somewhere out of the desert--he was borrowing habits right and left from his camels, we often told him--and gave us the cheerful information that we were to convoy some wagons back to Luderitzbucht, which wagons, he added, were only then being off-loaded. Dusk was spreading like a gray blanket across the face of the sands, and the prospect of a night ride at the tail of a string of creaking wagons was not enticing. We asked him how he knew, and he retired into his newly acquired camelism, and went off to his uncouth beasts. But he was right, and an hour later saw us--or heard us rather, for it was pitch dark--starting on such a ride as I hope never again to suffer. The road from Kolmanskuppe to Luderitzbucht is rendered distinct from the country through which it runs by means of white-painted paraffin tins placed at irregular intervals along its alleged sides. That it does not otherwise differ to any marked extent from the surrounding country is due less, I think, to the surveyor than to the country, which is mainly precipices and small but very knobby hills. I have since traveled that road in the daytime, and its unrelieved roughness--unless an occasional wallow in deep sand can be called relief--makes of it a thing to be remembered; but of that night, when our nostrils, and our throats, and our eyes were filled with the dust kicked up by close upon a hundred mules and half as many horses, and our ears were deafened by the harsh thunder of empty wagons bouncing into and out of deep holes and over fire-spitting granite boulders, recollection is a mere headache. For the first half-mile or so--my section had now become the rearguard--we rode at some fifty yards behind the last wagon. We did this for several reasons: firstly, because the air was less full of dust at that distance; secondly, because we could more or less select our own pace instead of having, every now and then, to pull our horses back upon their haunches to avoid spitting them on the brake handle of a wagon stopped suddenly in its drunken career by virtue of collision with some more than usually imposing obstruction; and thirdly--but this I do not think was a real reason--because we had been ordered to do so. VI--THE FRIGHTENED HORSES--AND THE CAMELS