passed away. When I turned round Jock was 

 still asleep : little incidents like that brought his 

 deafness home. 



***** 



It was our last day's hunting together ; and I went 

 back to the dreary round of hard, hopeless, useless 

 struggle and daily loss. 



One day, a calm cloudless day, there came without 

 warning a tremendous booming roar that left the air 

 vibrating and seemed to shake the very earth, as a 

 thousand echoes called and answered from hill to hill 

 down the long valley. There was nothing to explain 

 it ; the kaffirs turned a sickly grey, and appealed to 

 me ; but I could give them no explanation it was 

 something beyond my ken and they seemed to think 

 it an evil omen of still greater ill-luck. But, as it 

 turned out, the luck was not all bad : some days 

 passed before the mystery was solved, and then we 

 came to where Coombes, with whom a week earlier 

 I had tried and failed to keep pace, had been 

 blown to pieces with his boys, waggon, oxen, and three 

 tons of dynamite : there was no fragment of waggon 

 bigger than one's hand ; and the trees all around were 

 barked on one side. We turned out to avoid the 

 huge hole in the drift, and passed on. 



There were only twenty oxen left when we 

 reached the drift below Fig Tree. The water 

 was nearly breast high and we carried three- 

 fourths of the loads through on our heads, case 

 by case, to make the pull as easy as possible - 

 for the oxen, as they could only crawl then. 



445 



