After this we travelled on without any further misadventure till after one o'clock,when we called a halt,and having drunk a little water,not much,for water was precious,and rested for half an hour,started on again.
On,on we went till at last the east began to blush like the cheek of a girl.Then there came faint rays of primrose light that changed presently to golden bars,through which the dawn glided out across the desert.The stars grew pale and paler still till at last they vanished;the golden moon waxed wan,and her mountain ridges stood out clear against her sickly face like the bones on the face of a dying man;then came spear upon spear of glorious light flashing far away across the boundless wilderness,piercing and firing the veils of mist till the desert was draped in a tremulous golden glow,and it was day.
Still we did not halt,though by this time we should have been glad.enough to do so,for We knew that when once the sun was fully up it would be almost impossible for us to travel in it.At length,about six o'clock,we spied a little pile of rocks rising out of the plain,and to this we dragged ourselves.As luck would have it,here we found an overhanging slab of rock carpeted beneath with smooth sand,which afforded a most grateful shelter from the heat.Underneath this we crept,and having drank some water each and eaten a bit of biltong,we lay down and were soon sound asleep.
It was three o'clock in the afternoon before we woke,to find our three bearers preparing to return.They had already had enough of the desert,and no number of knives would have tempted them to come a step farther.So we had a hearty drink,and,having emptied our water-bottles,filled them up again from the gourds they had brought with them,and then watched them depart on their twenty miles'tramp home.
At half-past four we also started on.It was lonely and desolate work,for,with the exception of a few ostriches,there was not a single living creature to be seen on all the vast expanse of sandy plain.It was evidently too dry for game,and,with the exception of a deadly looking cobra or two,we saw no reptiles.One insect,however,was abundant,and that was the common or house fly.There they came,"not as single spies,but in battalions,"as I think the Old Testament says somewhere.He is an extraordinary animal,is the house fly.Go where you will you find him,and so it must always have been.I have seen him enclosed in amber which must,I was told,have been half a million years old,looking exactly like his descendant of today,and I have little doubt that when the last man lies dying on the earth he will be buzzing round -if that event should happen to occur in summer -watching for an opportunity to settle on his nose.
At sunset we halted,waiting for the moon to rise.At ten she came up beautiful and serene as ever,and,with one halt about two o'clock in the morning,we trudged wearily on through the night,till at last the welcome sun put a period to our labors.We drank a little and flung ourselves down,thoroughly tired out,on the sand,and were soon all asleep.There was no need to set a watch,for we had nothing to fear from anybody or anything in that vast,untenanted plain.Our only enemies were heat,thirst,and flies,but far rather would I have faced any danger from man or beast than that awful trinity.This time we were not so lucky as to find a sheltering rock to guard us from the glare of the sun,with the result that about seven o'clock we woke up experiencing the exact sensations one would attribute to a beefsteak on a gridiron.We were literally being baked through and through.The burning sun seemed to be sucking our very blood out of us.
We sat up.and gasped.
"Phew!"said I,grabbing at the halo of flies which buzzed cheerfully round my head.The heat did not affect them.
"My word,"said Sir Henry.
"It is hot!"said Good.
It was hot,indeed,and there was not a bit of shelter to be had.