from the Curator of the Museum asking me if I
would care to act as guide to two gentlemen who wished to follow up the
Orange River from its mouth and possibly proceed up the then almost
unknown Fish River into Damaraland. I did not care about going back,
for my recent trip had been a very rough one; but I was heartily sick
of Cape Town, and so I went round to the hotel where the two men were
staying, taking the note which the Curator had sent me. 'They don't
want to trade or prospect,' he had written me, 'the trip is simply for
scientific purposes. Hector Montrose is an ethnologist of wide repute,
and he wishes to study the race characteristics of the Hottentots and
Bushmen. He is a brilliant disciple of Darwin, too, and has spent a lot
of time and money on several trips to the interior of Borneo and other
remote spots in search of the so-called "missing link;" and he is, I
know, extremely anxious to get near some of those huge baboons that are
said to exist along the Orange River. His brother John is quite
different, and as long as he is with his brother and there's plenty to
shoot he's happy anywhere.'

"I rather expected to meet a couple of old fossils, but to my agreeable
surprise I found John and Hector Montrose both younger men than myself
and I was under thirty then. Fine young fellows they were too, nearly
of an age, and as much alike as two peas. Of medium size, well-knit,
and muscular, they were exactly the type of man for a rough trip such
as that which we were soon planning. For all my scruples went by the
board within ten minutes of our first meeting, and I fell absolutely
under the spell and charm of their virile personalities. Splendid
chaps, both of them: I never met their like. I can see them now as they
sat listening to me. I discussed the trip, and described the kind of
country we should have to cover. Their dark, keen, eager faces were so
absolutely alike that, except when they laughed, I could scarce tell
which was which. Hector, the elder, had had the whole of his front
teeth so stopped and plated with gold dentistry that there was but
little ivory to be seen, and when he laughed this gave him a strange
and rather unpleasing appearance.

"Within a week we were on the veld, and two months later were within
fifty miles of where we are sitting now farther up the Orange, where
the Great Fish River runs into the larger stream. It is a wild and
desolate spot to-day, and there are hippo still on the isl