three o'clock in the afternoon before
At length , about an hour later , we spied a little pile of boulders rising out of the plain , and to this we dragged ourselves . As luck would have it , here we found an overhanging slab of rock carpeted beneath with smooth sand , which afforded a most grateful shelter from the heat . Underneath this we crept , and each of us having drunk some water and eaten a bit of biltong , we lay down and soon were sound asleep . It was three o'clock in the afternoon before we woke , to find our bearers preparing to return . They had seen enough of the desert already , and no number of knives would have tempted them to come a step farther . So we took a hearty drink , and having emptied our water-bottles , filled them up again from the gourds that they had brought with them , and then watched them depart on their twenty miles ' tramp home . At half-past four we also started .