Made a disastrous stand at 8 p.m., as we succeeded in losing our way in the record time of fifteen minutes, thanks to having no guide and to a flighty and uncertain young moon, which insisted on playing hide and seek at the most awkward times. However, we struck the wire at last, not the barbed variety fortunately, and had brief periods of comparatively smooth going, variegated by such trifling mishaps as a broken trace, falling mule, or mule and harness so mixed up that we couldn't distinguish which was harness and which was mule and requiring careful sorting out! Veldt stones were also somewhat inconvenient, as they vary in size to anything above or below a Pickford van. However, it was a fine night and the mules almost seemed to warm to their work, racing along in great style at fully three miles an hour on a smoothish bit of road and appreciably downhill!
What rapture to be out on the starry veldt and to have left that Enslin "News"--the transport lines--miles (five and a doubtful bit) behind us. Shortly afterwards the moon again appeared, and we proceeded to negotiate a very promising nullah with gently sloping sides. Full speed ahead and up we go, but, alas! the latter part of our programme was somewhat disarranged, like Labby's furniture at Northampton, owing to the fact that buck waggons and mule transport are not adapted to racing through a truckload of sand of uncertain depth but of certain difficulty! However, "man the wheels and shove behind" was the natural sequence of events, and when the mules ceased pulling in every direction except the right one from sheer exhaustion, a few judicious cracks of the sjambok, together with a few different languages, mostly bad, and up we eventually did go.
A wide stretch of perfectly flat veldt lay before us, and we shortly lost both moon and wire simultaneously. Some one suggested "follow the track": valuable advice, but difficult to carry out, as there happened to be about fourteen of them, and all in different directions. Pleasant predicament to be in: 1 a.m., cloudy sky, and lost on the anything but trackless veldt! Feel about as comfortable as the man who was going to be hanged at 8 a.m. Finally decided to proceed at right angles, and return our wrong way if necessary, and succeeded in finding that precious wire at last. Persistency is the road to success, but what about an old hen sitting on a china egg?