agony, I gradually worked my limbs clear of the incubus pressing
on them, and tried to stand up. But this I could not do, some injury to
my spine preventing me, and it was as a beast, on all fours, that I at
length made shift to crawl in search of the water I was dying for. Each
yard I crawled was agony to me, but at last I came to a rock-encircled
pool in which lay water clear and deep, and into which a tiny stream
splashed and gurgled from an overhanging cliff. Sweet and pure the
water was, and in great abundance. I peered into its dark depths and
could see the white sand glimmering at the bottom, full ten or twelve
feet below me as I judged.

I crawled to it, and I drank as I had never drank before; and I bathed
my tortured face and limbs; finding that, miraculously, none were
broken, though I was bruised and aching in every bone, and to stand
erect was quite beyond me.

So I drank, and slept, and drank again, and later found strength and
appetite sufficient to crawl back to where the dead horses lay, and to
search among the scattered contents of my pack for some biltong, and
the wherewithal to dress my wounds.

And thus for days I lived, and nursed myself gradually back to a
measure of my former strength; dragging myself painfully from the water
to the shadow of the rocks to sleep, feeling little anxiety as to where
I was or what was to happen to me. I had water in plenty and food
sufficient for the present, and after the awful experiences of the
desert my one desire was to rest and sleep.

But with returning health came curiosity; and although I was still bent
and could not walk upright, I managed to move about and to find out
something of this strange prison into which I had been hurled in my
frantic flight before the sandstorm.

Apparently I was in the hollow cup of an extinct crater, for on all
sides towered perpendicular cliffs of dark granite-like rock, so smooth
and unbroken for the most part that a baboon would scarce have found
foothold upon them indeed, in many places they actually overhung.
Almost circular, and about a quarter of a mile in diameter, the floor
of this place was to a great extent covered in verdure, broken here and
there with rocks, and except where I had fallen there was but little
bare sand.

How I had escaped being smashed to pieces was inexplicable, for the
sheer wall of rock that penned me in was, I judged, at least five
hundred feet in height, and the horses' bones now picked