But I could hear nothing.  There was a scraping and rustling on the moor, but that was only the wind and the little wild things of the hills.  A fox, perhaps, or a blue hare.  I convinced my reason, but not my senses, and for long I lay awake with my ears at full cock and every nerve tense.  Then I fell asleep, and woke to the first flush of dawn.

The sun was behind the Coolin and the hills were black as ink, but far out in the western seas was a broad band of gold.  I got up and went down to the shore.  The mouth of the stream was shallow, but as I moved south I came to a place where two small capes enclosed an inlet.  It must have been a fault in the volcanic rock, for its depth was portentous.  I stripped and dived far into its cold abysses, but I did not reach the bottom.  I came to the surface rather breathless, and struck out to sea, where I floated on my back and looked at the great rampart of crag.  I saw that the place where I had spent the night was only a little oasis of green at the base of one of the grimmest corries the imagination could picture.  It was as desert as Damaraland.  I noticed, too, how sharply the cliffs rose from the level.  There were chimneys and gullies by which a man might have made his way to the summit, but no one of them could have been scaled except by a mountaineer.

I was feeling better now, with all the frowsiness washed out of me, and I dried myself by racing up and down the heather.  Then I noticed something.  There were marks of human feet at the top of the deep-water inlet—­not mine, for they were on the other side.  The short sea-turf was bruised and trampled in several places, and there were broken stems of bracken.  I thought that some fisherman had probably landed there to stretch his legs.

But that set me thinking of the Portuguese Jew.  After breakfasting on my last morsels of food—­a knuckle of braxy and a bit of oatcake—­I set about tracking him from the place where he had first entered the glen.  To get my bearings, I went back over the road I had come myself, and after a good deal of trouble I found his spoor.  It was pretty clear as far as the stream, for he had been walking—­or rather running—­over ground with many patches of gravel on it.  After that it was difficult, and I lost it entirely in the rough heather below the crags.  All that I could make out for certain was that he had crossed the stream, and that his business, whatever it was, had been with the few acres of tumbled wilderness below the precipices.

I spent a busy morning there, but found nothing except the skeleton of a sheep picked clean by the ravens.  It was a thankless job, and I got very cross over it.  I had an ugly feeling that I was on a false scent and wasting my time.  I wished to Heaven I had old Peter with me.  He could follow spoor like a Bushman, and would have riddled the Portuguese Jew’s track out of any jungle on earth.  That was a game I had never learned, for in the old days I had always left it to my natives.  I chucked the attempt, and lay disconsolately on a warm patch of grass and smoked and thought about Peter.  But my chief reflections were that I had breakfasted at five, that it was now eleven, that I was intolerably hungry, that there was nothing here to feed a grasshopper, and that I should starve unless I got supplies.