ocean; and to the
north, across the Orange River, lie the dreaded sand-dunes of German
South-West Africa.

It was in the direction of the dunes, gleaming vague and silver-white
in the clear moonlight, that the eyes of the three white men
prospectors who had forgathered in this lonely spot were turned as they
sat, finishing their evening meal, beside a bright fire that lit up the
broken and roofless walls. They had met after months of lonely
wanderings: Sidney and Ransford amongst the mountains of the
Richtersfeld, Jason from long and arduous expeditions along the Great
Fish River and amongst the trackless sands across the river. The talk
had been of the dunes; of men lost and dying of thirst a few miles from
camp; of terrific storms that lifted the sand in huge masses, and
whirled it across the land, overwhelming all it encountered; of whole
dunes that were shifted by the wind, leaving gruesome things disclosed
in the hollows where once they had stood; of diamonds, danger and
death.

"Yes!" said Jason, "there's many a man been lost since the diamond rush
first started: gone away from camp and never turned up again died of
thirst most of them, of course, though I daresay the Bushmen accounted
for some. Sometimes the sand has overwhelmed them and buried their
bodies for ever. Sometimes after a big storm it gives up its dead as
the sea does. I've seen some queer things there myself. Once near
Easter Cliffs, after a terrific storm had shifted all the dunes, I came
across the bodies of a dozen white men, all together and mummified and
wonderfully preserved. God knows how they died and how long they'd been
there!

"But the weirdest thing that ever happened to me up there was when
Carfax disappeared. You remember Carfax? A tall, bony, powerful chap he
was, quiet and dour, and with a strong vein of superstition in him.
Anyhow, he was a good prospector and a reliable man, and when the rush
for the northern fields took place about two years ago. He was one of a
party of four of us who had been landed with a few kegs of water and
bare necessities on the waterless coast opposite Hollams Bird Island.
Here we searched in vain for diamonds, the dunes being exceptionally
difficult and the wind that came up every afternoon converting the
whole country into a whirling chaos that it was impossible to see in,
or work in next to impossible to exist in.

"On the third evening, after an exceptionally strong gale had nearly
choked, blind