et-Salem country with extensions and
additions. Vast gorges, black and brown kopjes, boulders, sand
stretches, clumps of bush, minute trees. And then, on Thursday the 29th
of April (memory holds the date like a vice), we saw grass. It was
grass. It was undoubtedly grass--the kind of grass that gave one the
feeling that this particular veld, like a man prematurely bald through
worry or riotous living, had been trying some hair restorer with
ludicrous results--grass whitish, feeble, attenuated, that to be seen
at all wanted an eye levelled along the ground.

Each half hour brought its surprise as we moved along, General Botha on
his white horse at the head of the column, just visible to the eye
through the thick curtain of white dust our horses' feet flung up into
the sun glare. We rode in great gorges between kopjes. We crossed dry
river courses. We clattered over the hard bosoms of rocks, switchbacked
up and down each hour working out of the desert. Trees began to
appear--caricatures of trees. Then game spoor was reported. And suddenly,
just after noon, rain fell--out of one cloud in a sky otherwise brazenly
clear five drops fell. I counted five on my bridle hand.

Rain on the edge of the Namib Desert. It was ludicrous, too bizarre; it
was the last straw. We gasped. A deep roar of ironical cheering went
up. The Commander-in-Chief looked round and laughed. When we outspanned
later the horses made a show of grazing for the first time for five
months. The sagacious animals showed plain amazement in their eyes. At
Wilhelmsfeste (Tsaobis) the bushveld begins. The water supply of
Otjimbingwe is the feature of that rather quaint settlement. One must
ever associate it with its fine aeromotor pumping the precious fluid
for parched man and beast to drink their full after the desert passage
in the shade of cool palms many years old.

[Illustration: German prisoners of war, imprisoned at Karibib]
[Illustration: Karibib]
[Illustration: Towards Windhuk. The first troops in Waldau]

[Illustration: The first South African Engineer Corps Staff at Windhuk]

During the great trek alarms regarding mines were most frequent. There
were many wonderful escapes. It seems a marvel that the enemy were not
more successful than they were with these deadly machines. Suffer
casualties we did; but if all the mines that were laid had blown up our
casualties would have been formidable indeed. But somehow those mines
seemed foreordained not to act.