A LINK WITH THE WORLD 119 



seen; we might even recognise the contours of 

 the ridge beyond the northern end of which 

 Gamoep lay. Soon we should pass from the 

 kingdom of ancient silence to where the 

 squalid tents of nomadic men were temporarily 

 pitched, — to where the fat-tailed sheep 

 crowded, with anxious eyes, around the creak- 

 ing derrick and the scanty trough. But to us, 

 intruders as we were, the desert had still to pay 

 tribute. 



We started, Hendrick and I, riding quietly 

 forth on a course a little to the east of south, 

 for we had a wide detour to make. I knew 

 the vicinity well; it was, literally speaking, a 

 part of the desert, but I found it hard to ack- 

 nowledge it as such, for the reason that the 

 western hills were in sight. These seemed to 

 link us with the conventional world. 



We passed over a tract studded with small, 

 dense patches of low scrub; it looked like a 

 miniature archipelago in the boundless ocean 

 of " toa." Here brown " duiker " antelopes 

 were numerous. So far as I knew this was the 

 only part of Bushmanland where such were to 

 be found. As we rode on the little creatures 

 sprang out, right and left, from the patches of 

 cover and bounded gracefully away. 



Far to the south-west the herd of springbuck 



