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'After calling for a bit, we heard an answering call away down the vlei, and the darkness favouring us, the lost men soon came up and we arrived at the clump of bushes where the patrol was stationed. We all lay down in the mud to rest, for we were tired out.
Our progress was of course very slow, until at length the vlei was reached. We passed on our way several trees of considerable size overturned by elephants; many of them being ten inches in diameter, it must have required great strength to uproot them. Others were broken short off, a little distance from the ground, by the elephants.
Presently, however, we passed out into the wilderness proper, and for a while climbed up and down the steep, shifting slopes, till from the crest of one of them the chief pointed out what in South Africa is called a pan, or vlei, covered with green reeds, and explained by signs that in these lay the lions.
After the soaking had gone on for some considerable time, I took the tobacco out of the water, squeezed it, and set it out in the sun on a board to dry. The liquor remaining in the pannikin was just the color of milkless coffee made with vlei water. He returned alone. The afternoon was hot, and Dell was extremely thirsty. When he got near his wagon he called out for water.
I camped outside the Carrot homestead that night and the next day, and learned something of the family's way of life. Carrot was shooting big buck sable and roan without a license, I gathered. He was trading cattle for most of the venison that he amassed. He had by now a goodly herd feeding in a green vlei near the border.
Then the young lord Ralph's cousin said that as they journeyed yesterday at a distance of about an hour on horseback from the farm he had noticed a large vlei, or pan, where were many ducks and also some antelope.
He nodded, and in the first mile we managed to edge a good way forward. Several things came to aid us. As I have said, we of the centre were not marching in close ranks, but in a loose column, and often it was possible by taking a short cut on rough ground to join the column some distance ahead. There was a vlei, too, which many circumvented, but we swam, and this helped our lead.
Coming out of the bush on the near edge of the vlei, before going down into it, I saw fires lit, and scherms and figures showing dark against the fires right along the opposite edge of the vlei. We skirted the vlei to our left, got round the end of it, and at once rode through a lot of scherms containing hundreds of people.
From the appearance of the country we had no doubt that we should meet with melons, even though we might not come across water before we arrived at the vlei. We had, according to our calculation, gone about two-thirds of the distance without having shot a single animal, when the weather began to change.
From what I've seen at Kolman's Kop, this place looks extremely likely. I wonder whether, after all, they have been a bit too clever? I'll have a look, anyway." Between him and the dune where the bogus find had been made there stretched a wide, flat space of comparatively firm ground a so-called anp, or shallow vlei, in which at some time water had accumulated.
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