As A Rule The Blacks Have Such Splendid Teeth That The Dwarf's
Case Is Remarkable, Seeing That He Was Not At All An Old Man.
[* Note: A native bark "portmanteau," brought back from this locality,
was opened at Newstead Abbey and found to contain -
1. Plumes of hawks' and crows' feathers.
2. Neck-bands of opossum wool.
3. String bracelets.
4. Fragments of quartz, suitable for spear and chisel heads.
5. Fragments of sandstone, for making red paint.
6. Message-stick.
7. A stick 12 inches long, wrapped in downy feathers and greasy string;
on this was wound a great length of human-hair string, forming a
bobbin-shaped article, the use of which I do not know. I have now three
portmanteaus still unopened.]
The Dwarf Well had a better supply than any we had seen, and it is
possible that there is some soakage into it from the surrounding country.
It lies nearly five miles south of a low range of hills, the highest
point of which bears 1 degree from it; to the North a sand-ridge, to the
South a spinifex plain, six miles wide, then more ridges. I make its
position to be lat. 22 degrees 19 minutes, long. 128 degrees 16 minutes.
On the plain to the south are one or two small outcrops of ironstone and
quartz, sticking up out of the sand, as if some hills other than sandstone
had existed, and become buried by the all-spreading sand. I carved C on a
tall mulga-tree close to the well.
May 9th we left the well on a Southerly course, and were soon amongst the
ridges, which continued for the next two days. The night of the 11th,
having skirted a line of rough cliffs, we camped about three miles North
of a very prominent single hill, which I named Mount Webb, after W. F.
Webb, Esq., of Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire. As the sun rose that
morning the mirage of a lake of apparently great size was visible for
90 degrees of the horizon - that is, from East round to South. Neither from
the cliffs that we skirted, nor from Mount Webb, was any lake visible, but
it is more than probable that a large salt lake exists in this locality,
possibly connecting, in a broken line, Lake White and Lake Macdonald. A
mirage sometimes appears in exactly the opposite direction from that in
which the lake lies, but I noticed when standing on the Stansmore Range
that as the sun rose Lake White was clearly visible, whilst when the sun
had risen a few degrees above the horizon the lake disappeared. I am of
opinion, therefore, that large lakes will some day be found to lie to the
North-East of Mount Webb. Had we not been so pressed for time I should
have made a flying trip in this direction. Mount Webb is flat-topped,
isolated, rocky-sided, innocent of all vegetation, of sandstone capped
with quartzite, standing out with imposing clearness some five hundred
feet above a plain of spinifex and mulga scrubs.
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