“23rd.—­Struggled forward once more as soon as the sun was well up, and had thawed our limbs a little.  We are now in a dreadful plight, and I fear that unless we get food this will be our last day’s journey.  But little brandy left.  Good, Sir Henry, and Umbopa bear up wonderfully, but Ventvoegel is in a very bad way.  Like most Hottentots, he cannot stand cold.  Pangs of hunger not so bad, but have a sort of numb feeling about the stomach.  Others say the same.  We are now on a level with the precipitous chain, or wall of lava, linking the two Breasts, and the view is glorious.  Behind us the glowing desert rolls away to the horizon, and before us lie mile upon mile of smooth hard snow almost level, but swelling gently upwards, out of the centre of which the nipple of the mountain, that appears to be some miles in circumference, rises about four thousand feet into the sky.  Not a living thing is to be seen.  God help us; I fear that our time has come.”

And now I will drop the journal, partly because it is not very interesting reading; also what follows requires telling rather more fully.

All that day—­the 23rd May—­we struggled slowly up the incline of snow, lying down from time to time to rest.  A strange gaunt crew we must have looked, while, laden as we were, we dragged our weary feet over the dazzling plain, glaring round us with hungry eyes.  Not that there was much use in glaring, for we could see nothing to eat.  We did not accomplish more than seven miles that day.  Just before sunset we found ourselves exactly under the nipple of Sheba’s left Breast, which towered thousands of feet into the air, a vast smooth hillock of frozen snow.  Weak as we were, we could not but appreciate the wonderful scene, made even more splendid by the flying rays of light from the setting sun, which here and there stained the snow blood-red, and crowned the great dome above us with a diadem of glory.

“I say,” gasped Good, presently, “we ought to be somewhere near that cave the old gentleman wrote about.”

“Yes,” said I, “if there is a cave.”

“Come, Quatermain,” groaned Sir Henry, “don’t talk like that; I have every faith in the Dom; remember the water!  We shall find the place soon.”

“If we don’t find it before dark we are dead men, that is all about it,” was my consolatory reply.

For the next ten minutes we trudged in silence, when suddenly Umbopa, who was marching along beside me, wrapped in his blanket, and with a leather belt strapped so tightly round his stomach, to “make his hunger small,” as he said, that his waist looked like a girl’s, caught me by the arm.

“Look!” he said, pointing towards the springing slope of the nipple.

I followed his glance, and some two hundred yards from us perceived what appeared to be a hole in the snow.

“It is the cave,” said Umbopa.