At first the going was good, apart from a couple of bad patches of soft sand. But towards evening they ran into a series of dunes which swept to the darkening horizon. Most were razor-backed and it demanded a great deal of skill on the part of the driver to traverse them. Matz soon showed that he had an excellent eye for terrain and just what an experienced driver he was. He had the special technique at his finger-tips. He would position the tank at the base of the dune and charge at the mountain of sand at full speed. Just before the tank was about to lurch alarmingly over the top of the dune, perhaps to face a sheer drop of ten or twenty metres on the other side, he would jam on the brakes, swing the steering round violently and rattle down the other side at a frightening, hair-raising angle. Some of the other drivers, especially those in the halftracks which did not have equivalent traction, were not so successful in their attempts to surmount the dunes. Regularly a cursing driver would get bogged down helplessly in the sand.
