"Then Piet Naude said, 'Brothers, let us go away from this place. I am afraid of all I see. God did not send all this wealth easy to our hands at no cost of labor. Let us go away lest we be entrapped into some devilishness.' But the others laughed him down and would not listen to him, saying his brain was rotten in his head with the long trek and the sun.
"So there they stayed and built themselves houses and kraals, and set about gathering the hay and catching cattle. But everything fell out so easily and all they needed came so plentifully that there grew over them a sort of sloth, and they slept without shame in the hours of work, and gave no attention to the future.
"Then by degrees it began to be noticed that they were growing fat. Soon they had bellies like sows, and their necks and their limbs became so great that they were obliged to go about without clothes, like the wild Kafirs and the brutes that perish. And when one of them would lie down, his fatness so burdened him that without help he could scarcely rise to his feet. None were spared: even the godly Piet Naude was as great as an ox; but the difference was, he felt shame for it all, whereas the others felt none.
"Many a time he implored them to inspan and leave the place; but each time they cried him down. And when he said he would go himself, they reminded him that it was he who had urged them to trek, and asked him if he would now desert them. So for a while he stayed.
"But at length he resolved he would no longer be bound, and he called to know who would go with him. But as he spoke a storm came up, and the wind screamed and the rain threshed, and the poor fat creatures waddled off to their houses, and of all that people only one stayed to go with Piet Naude. It was a young Burgher whose name was Hendrik Van der Merwe, a decent lad; and the two set off together.
"But when they came to the beautiful kloof they were amazed at the work of the storm. The wind had torn great boulders from the hills and rolled them down; and the rain had churned the earth into mud, and washed the roots of the trees loose; so that where everything had once been so fair and orderly there was now a crazy wilderness of rocks and thorns and mud.
"But they breasted the obstacles gallantly, those two alone; and at hazard of their lives they climbed over and under great rocking crags, cutting their hands and tearing their feet with the sharp stones and the thorns of the mimosas. But as they went they saw with delight that their fatness dwindled from them, and their limbs fell back to their old shapeliness, while the blubber on their cheeks retreated from their eyes and left them free as before.
"So after three days of climbing and slipping and scrambling, the rain and the wind ceased, and they came forth into the country beyond, tall and slender as they were before."
This, in reality, is the end of the story, but the children are wont to ask in chorus what the two heroes did next.
"They went back," says Vrouw Grobelaar, omitting all details of how the return was accomplished; "and when the Burghers went forth on the Great Trek, they went with them, and lived long, had many children, and then died happy and were buried."