We ourselves stopped about four o’clock.  In a few hours we had come a hard three days’ march.  Over the side went our goods.  We bade the German a very affectionate farewell; for he was still to fill our drums from one of the streams out of Kilimanjaro and deliver them to us on his return trip next day.  We then all turned to and made camp.  The scrub desert here was exactly like the scrub desert for the last sixty miles.

The next morning we were up and off before sunrise.  In this job time was a very large element of the contract.  We must find our fringe-eared oryx before our water supply gave out.  Therefore we had resolved not to lose a moment.

The sunrise was most remarkable—­lace work, flat clouds, with burnished copper-coloured clouds behind glowing through the lace.  We admired it for some few moments.  Then one of us happened to look higher.  There, above the sky of the horizon, apparently suspended in mid-air half-way to the zenith, hung like delicate bubbles the double snow-cloud peaks of Kilimanjaro.  Between them and the earth we could apparently see clear sky.  It was in reality, of course, the blue-heat haze that rarely leaves these torrid plains.  I have seen many mountains in all parts of the world, but none as fantastically insubstantial; as wonderfully lofty; as gracefully able to yield, before clouds and storms and sunrise glows, all the space in infinity they could possibly use, and yet to tower above them serene in an upper space of its own.  Nearly every morning of our journey to come we enjoyed this wonderful vision for an hour or so.  Then the mists closed in.  The rest of the day showed us a grayish sky along the western horizon, with apparently nothing behind it.

In the meantime we were tramping steadily ahead over the desert; threading the thorn scrub, crossing the wide shallow grass-grown swales; spying about us for signs of game.  At the end of three or four miles we came across some ostrich and four hartebeeste.  This encouraged us to think we might find other game soon, for the hartebeeste is a gregarious animal.  Suddenly we saw a medium-sized squat beast that none of us recognized, trundling along like a badger sixty yards ahead.  Any creature not easily identified is a scientific possibility in Africa.  Therefore we fired at once.  One of the bullets hit his foreleg paw.  Immediately this astonishing small creature turned and charged us!  If his size had equalled his ferocity, he would have been a formidable opponent.  We had a lively few minutes.  He rushed us again and again, uttering ferocious growls.  We had to step high and lively to keep out of his way.  Between charges he sat down and tore savagely at his wounded paw.  We wanted him as nearly perfect a specimen as possible, so tried to rap him over the head with a club.  Owing to remarkably long teeth and claws, this was soon proved impracticable; so we shot him.  He weighed about fifty pounds, and we subsequently learned that he was a honey badger, an animal very rarely captured.