For days afterwards his right arm was quite useless, and the experience made him extremely nervous whenever scorpions took a hand in our proceedings, which was pretty often, for the desert swarms with them, and scarcely a morning passed but we found three or four of the venomous things snuggled in between our blankets and the sand on which we had lain.
We found the Orange at Upington extremely low, and even the favoured river-lands not wholly free from the effects of the drought.
News from the desert was very conflicting. The farmers were suffering badly, and veldt for transport animals along the route to Rietfontein was practically non-existent, but most of them seemed to believe that heavy rains had fallen in the actual reserve eastward, to which we were bound.
Into this large tract of country no one ever went, except an occasional camel trooper, and their infrequent patrols did not extend farther than the large pans known as “Aar Pan,” “Gunga Pan” and “Betterstadt Pan,” which were said to lie about twenty miles from the western edge of the desert.
A patrol had passed that way about a month previously, and had seen no sign of rain having fallen, but Bushmen had reported that t’samma was flourishing farther east, and the only way to find out if such was the case was to go in and find out for ourselves.
“CANDELABRA EUPHORBIA.”
The Bushmen make arrow-poison from this.
“OLD GERT.”