together were entering the underwood about 400 yards in front of me, I fired; but my bullet struck a tree, quite close to them, without touching them. Meriko had the laugh of me; he could not refrain from expressing his satisfaction that the property of his liege lord had been uninjured, and pledged himself to report the circumstance to the king on his return to Shoshong.
The bullocks had not a drop of water all day long. It was consequently of the most urgent importance that we should get on to the next spring, and we agreed that there was no alternative but to travel on all night, if néed be, in defiance of the difficulties we might encounter. Niger, unbidden, took the lead, followed by Pit carrying a breech-loader; Meriko led the foremost oxen by the bridle, which he held in his left hand, whilst he held up a flaming torch in the other; Theunissen took the reins, and I sat on the box with one loaded gun in my hand, and another behind me ready to be used in any emergency. By eleven o’clock, however, we reached some springs; they proved to be the most southerly of those known to the neighbouring Madenassanas as the Klamaklenyana springs, and here we came across several elephant-hunters whom I had seen before, some of them a few weeks previously, and others at the Soa lake. They were all full of complaints at the bad luck they had experienced.
As implied by their name “four, one behind another,” the Klamaklenyana springs consist of four separate marshy pieces of water, between which, on either hand, are numerous rain-pools, full at various periods of the year. Close to the spring by which we were halting there was a waggon-track, made by
