CHAPTER XII. 
OCCURRENCES AND OBSERVATIONS AT THE RIVER MAKKWARIN. 
July 2nd. Our first business this morning, was to station the wag- 
gons in the most convenient spot ; to make a shelter round our fire ; 
and to construct a hut with mats, bushes, and dry grass. 
At the place where we halted, the Makkwdrin was merely a ditch 
about twenty feet broad, without a tree, or even reeds, to mark its 
course ; although acacias are here and there scattered on the adjoining 
plain. There was abundance of water in the deeper hollows of its 
bed ; and at two or three hundred yards below our station, it ran in 
a plentiful stream. The singularity of a river being dry in some parts, 
running in others, and in others merely a stagnant pool, has been 
already explained, when describing the Reed River in the Roggeveld. 
The banks of the Makkwarin are in some places ten feet deep, and 
by this circumstance it was ascertained that the substratum of this part 
of the country, is a compact lime-stone rock of primitive formation. 
The depth to which this rock descends, or the nature of the next 
