60 
WANT OF WATER. 
Chap. Ill, 
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 this 
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 fad. 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 morniug 
of the third day, when we imagined the steeds must be near the 
Avater, we discovered them just alongside the waggons. The guide, 
having come across the fresh footprints of some Bushmen who had 
gone in an opposite dfrection 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 Eamotobi most 
trustingly along the Bushmen’s spoor, though that led them away 
from the water we Avere in search of; witnessed the operation of 
slaughtering, skinning, and cutting up the antelope; and then, 
after a hard day’s tod, found himself close upon the waggons! 
The knoAvledge still retained by Eamotobi of the trackless waste 
of scrub. Enough wliich we Avere now passiug, 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 morniug, he remarked, “ Wlien we come to that hollow we 
shall light upon the highway of Sekomi; and beyond that again 
lies the river Mokdkowhich, 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. 
