On seeing me the _pauw_ bunched up together, as I expected that they would, and I fired two shots straight into the thick of them, and, as luck would have it, brought one down, a fine fellow, that weighed about twenty pounds.

In half an hour we had a fire made of dry melon stalks, and he was toasting over it, and we made such a feed as we had not tasted for a week.

We ate that _pauw_; nothing was left of him but his leg-bones and his beak, and we felt not a little the better afterwards.
That night we went on again with the moon, carrying as many melons as we could with us.

As we ascended we found the air grew cooler and cooler, which was a great relief to us, and at dawn, so far as we could judge, we were not more than about a dozen miles from the snow line.
Here we discovered more melons, and so had no longer any anxiety about water, for we knew that we should soon get plenty of snow.

But the ascent had now become very precipitous, and we made but slow progress, not more than a mile an hour.