Page:Lake Ngami.djvu/518

510 sometimes on foot, and at others on horseback or ox-back, over upward of a thousand miles of country, parts of it emulating the Sahara in scarcity of water and general inhospitality. Tongue is too feeble to express what I suffered at times. To say nothing of narrow escapes from lions and other dangerous beasts, I was constantly enduring the cravings of hunger and the agonies of thirst. Occasionally I was as much as two days without tasting food; and it not unfrequently happened that in the course of the twenty-four hours I could only once or twice moisten my parched lips. Sometimes I was so overcome by these causes, coupled with bodily fatigue, that I fainted. Once both my steed and myself (as seen in the sketch below) dropped down in the midst of a sand-plain, where we remained a long time in a state



bordering on unconsciousness, and exposed to all the injurious effects of a tropical sun. I would at times pursue my