The bold outline of the lofty hills with their thickly wooded slopes and kloofs add greatly to the beauty of the landscape, more particularly along the Orange river, where the rich vegetation, fine timber and bush, forming deep belts on both sides; the rugged and perpendicular rocks of many colours, which form its banks, clothed with lovely creepers hanging down in festoons with their scarlet pods, make the river scenery very beautiful; and to add to its charm the dense bush swarms with the grey monkey, baboons, and every variety of the cat tribe, even to the lion; pheasants, partridges, guinea-fowl, legions of snipes, ducks, geese, moor-hen, plovers, eagles, vultures, and a variety of hawks, some of them of great size, measuring from tip to tip eight feet; also the heron, crane, and stork, and a variety of others, in addition to the smaller tribes of birds with brilliant plumage. The otter is very plentiful, the banks being covered with their spoor; also the porcupine. There are a great many islands, many of them large and thickly wooded, and about 300 miles up the stream the beautiful and picturesque waterfall, the Aukrabies, which has a fall of over ninety feet, is a grand sight when the flood-waters come down in their annual flow, rising above their ordinary level from twenty-five to thirty feet, bringing down large trees that go rolling and crashing as they are carried along by the rushing water. I was outspanned on the north bank of this river in 1871, with two waggons and a cart, for the purpose of making a new tent to one of the waggons that had capsized and rolled over into a sluit a few days previously, and had sent the oxen, forty-eight, on to a neighbouring island to graze early in the morning, when the Griqua chief, living at his kraal not far from my camp, came and informed me the river was coming down. The herds were sent over immediately to bring them off, but before they could do so, the river had risen fifteen feet, consequently the oxen had to swim, passing down mid-stream with a small portion of their heads and horns only visible, the two herds swimming behind with blocks of wood under their arms, and they were carried down a mile and a half before they were able to land, and in less than two hours this river had risen thirty feet. There are many beautiful stones and pebbles in the river-bed, agate, soap-stone, petrified gum and wood, which I have found of white, brown, black, and red. Diamonds also are found occasionally mixed up in the gravel that has been brought down by heavy floods.