At length, about an hour later, we spied a little pile of boulders 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 each of us having drunk some water and eaten a bit of biltong, we lay down and soon were sound asleep.
It was three o'clock in the afternoon before we woke, to find our bearers preparing to return.

They had seen enough of the desert already, and no number of knives would have tempted them to come a step farther.

So we took a hearty drink, and having emptied our water-bottles, filled them up again from the gourds that they had brought with them, and then watched them depart on their twenty miles' tramp home.
At half-past four we also started.