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like a maniac, and waving something green. Off we all scrambled
towards him as fast as our wearied limbs would carry us, hoping that
he had found water.

"What is it, Umbopa, son of a fool?" I shouted in Zulu.

"It is food and water, Macumazahn," and again he waved the green
thing.

Then I saw what he had found. It was a melon. We had hit upon a patch
of wild melons, thousands of them, and dead ripe.

"Melons!" I yelled to Good, who was next me; and in another minute his
false teeth were fixed in one of them.

I think we ate about six each before we had done, and poor fruit as
they were, I doubt if I ever thought anything nicer.

But melons are not very nutritious, and when we had satisfied our
thirst with their pulpy substance, and put a stock to cool by the
simple process of cutting them in two and setting them end on in the
hot sun to grow cold by evaporation, we began to feel exceedingly
hungry. We had still some biltong left, but our stomachs turned from
biltong, and besides, we were obliged to be very sparing of it, for we
could not say when we should find more food. Just at this moment a
lucky thing chanced. Looking across the desert I saw a flock of about
ten large birds flying straight towards us.

"/Skit, Baas, skit!/" "Shoot, master, shoot!" whispered the Hottentot,
throwing himself on his face, an example which we all followed.

Then I saw that the birds were a flock of /pauw/ or bustards, and that
they would pass within fifty yards of my head. Taking one of the
repeating Winchesters, I waited till they were nearly over us, and
then jumped to my feet. On seeing me the /pauw/ bunched up together,
as I expected that they would, and I fired two shots straight into the
thick of them, and, as luck would have it, brought one down, a fine
fellow, that weighed about twenty pounds. In half an hour we had a
fire made of dry melon stalks, and he was toasting over it, and we
made such a feed as we had not tasted for a week. We ate that /pauw/;
nothing was left of him but his leg-bones and his beak, and we felt
not a little the better afterwards.

That night we went on again with the moon, carrying as many melons as
we could with us. As we ascended we found the air grew cooler and
cooler, which was a great relief to us, and at dawn, so far as we
could judge, we were not more than about a dozen miles from the snow
line. Here we discovered more melons, and so had no longer any anxiety
about water, for we knew that we should soon get plenty of snow. But
the ascent had now become very precipitous, and we made but slow
progress, not more than a mile an hour. Also that night we ate our
last morsel of biltong. As yet, with the exception of the /pauw/, we
had seen no living thing on the mountain, nor had we come across a
single spring or stream of water, which struck us as very odd,
considering the expanse of snow above us, which must, we thought, melt
sometimes. But as we afterwards discovered, owing to a cause which it

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