60 WANT OF WATER. Chap. III. 



so slowly we should never get there at all. The utmost endea- 

 vours of the servants, cracking their whips, screaming and beating, 

 got only nineteen miles out of the poor beasts. We had thus 

 proceeded forty-four miles from Serotli ; and the oxen were more 

 exhausted by the soft nature of the country, and the thirst, 

 than if- they had travelled double the distance over a hard road 

 containing supplies of water : we had, as far as we could judge, 

 still thirty miles more of the same dry work before us. At tins 

 season the grass becomes so dry as to crumble to powder in the 

 hands ; so the poor beasts stood wearily chewing, without taking 

 a single fresh -mouthful, and lowing painfully at the smell of 

 water in our vessels in the waggons. We were all determined to 

 succeed ; so we endeavoured to save the horses by sending them 

 forward with the guide, as a means of making a desperate effort 

 in case the oxen should fail. Murray went forward with them, 

 while Oswell and I remained to bring the waggons on their trail 

 as far as the cattle could drag them, intending then to send the 

 oxen forward too. 



The horses walked quickly away from us ; but on the morning 

 of the third day, when we imagined the steeds must be near the 

 water, we discovered them just alongside the waggons. The guide, 

 having come across the fresh footprints of some Bushmen who had 

 gone in an opposite direction to that which we wished to go, 

 turned aside to follow them. An antelope had been ensnared in 

 one of the Bushmen's pitfalls. Murray followed Bamotobi most 

 trustingly along the Bushmen's spoor, though that led them away 

 from the water we were in search of; witnessed the operation of 

 slaughtering, skinning, and cutting up the antelope ; and then, 

 after a hard day's toil, found himself close upon the waggons ! 

 The knowledge still retained by Bamotobi of the trackless waste 

 of scrub, through which we were now passing, seemed admirable. 

 For sixty or seventy miles beyond Serotli, one clump of bushes 

 and trees seemed exactly like another ; but, as we walked together 

 this morning, he remarked, " When we come to that hollow we 

 shall light upon the highway of Sekomi ; and beyond that again 

 lies the river Mokoko ;" which, though we passed along it, I could 

 not perceive to be a river-bed at all. 



After breakfast some of the men, who had gone forward on a 

 little path with some footprints of water-loving animals upon it, 



