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a guttural exclamation, pointed to the earth.

"What is it?" we exclaimed; and rising simultaneously we went to where
he was standing staring at the sand.

"Well," I said, "it is fresh Springbok spoor; what of it?"

"Springbucks do not go far from water," he answered in Dutch.

"No," I answered, "I forgot; and thank God for it."

This little discovery put new life into us; for it is wonderful, when
a man is in a desperate position, how he catches at the slightest
hope, and feels almost happy. On a dark night a single star is better
than nothing.

Meanwhile Ventvoegel was lifting his snub nose, and sniffing the hot
air for all the world like an old Impala ram who scents danger.
Presently he spoke again.

"I /smell/ water," he said.

Then we felt quite jubilant, for we knew what a wonderful instinct
these wild-bred men possess.

Just at that moment the sun came up gloriously, and revealed so grand
a sight to our astonished eyes that for a moment or two we even forgot
our thirst.

There, not more than forty or fifty miles from us, glittering like
silver in the early rays of the morning sun, soared Sheba's Breasts;
and stretching away for hundreds of miles on either side of them ran
the great Suliman Berg. Now that, sitting here, I attempt to describe
the extraordinary grandeur and beauty of that sight, language seems to
fail me. I am impotent even before its memory. Straight before us,
rose two enormous mountains, the like of which are not, I believe, to
be seen in Africa, if indeed there are any other such in the world,
measuring each of them at least fifteen thousand feet in height,
standing not more than a dozen miles apart, linked together by a
precipitous cliff of rock, and towering in awful white solemnity
straight into the sky. These mountains placed thus, like the pillars
of a gigantic gateway, are shaped after the fashion of a woman's
breasts, and at times the mists and shadows beneath them take the form
of a recumbent woman, veiled mysteriously in sleep. Their bases swell
gently from the plain, looking at that distance perfectly round and
smooth; and upon the top of each is a vast hillock covered with snow,
exactly corresponding to the nipple on the female breast. The stretch
of cliff that connects them appears to be some thousands of feet in
height, and perfectly precipitous, and on each flank of them, so far
as the eye can reach, extent similar lines of cliff, broken only here
and there by flat table-topped mountains, something like the world-
famed one at Cape Town; a formation, by the way, that is very common
in Africa.

To describe the comprehensive grandeur of that view is beyond my
powers. There was something so inexpressibly solemn and overpowering
about those huge volcanoes--for doubtless they are extinct volcanoes--
that it quite awed us. For a while the morning lights played upon the
snow and the brown and swelling masses beneath, and then, as though to

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