and our guides. After this we steered by the
stars through a land with very few inhabitants, timid and nondescript
folk who dwelt in scattered villages and scarcely understood the art of
cultivating the soil, even in its most primitive form.

A hundred miles or so farther on these villages ceased and thenceforward
we only encountered some nomads, little bushmen who lived on game which
they shot with poisoned arrows. Once they attacked us and killed two
of the Mazitu with those horrid arrows, against the venom of which no
remedy that we had in our medicine chest proved of any avail. On this
occasion Savage exhibited his courage if not his discretion, for rushing
out of our thorn fence, after missing a bushmen with both barrels at a
distance of five yards--he was, I think, the worst shot I ever saw--he
seized the little viper with his hands and dragged him back to camp. How
Savage escaped with his life I do not know, for one poisoned arrow went
through his hat and stuck in his hair and another just grazed his leg
without drawing blood.

This valorous deed was of great service to us, since we were able
through Hans, who knew something of the bushmen's language, to explain
to our prisoner that if we were shot at again he would be hung. This
information he contrived to shout, or rather to squeak and grunt, to
his amiable tribe, of which it appeared he was a kind of chief, with the
result that we were no more molested. Later, when we were clear of the
bushmen country, we let him depart, which he did with great rapidity.

By degrees the land grew more and more barren and utterly devoid of
inhabitants, till at last it merged into desert. At the edge of this
desert which rolled away without apparent limit we came, however, to
a kind of oasis where there was a strong and beautiful spring of water
that formed a stream which soon lost itself in the surrounding sand.
As we could go no farther, for even if we had wished to do so, and were
able to find water there, the Mazitu refused to accompany us into the
desert, not knowing what else to do, we camped in the oasis and waited.

As it happened, the place was a kind of hunter's paradise, since every
kind of game, large and small, came to the water to drink at night, and
in the daytime browsed upon the saltish grass that at this season of the
year grew plentifully upon the edge of the wilderness.

Amongst other creatures there were elephants in plenty that travelled
hither out of