Being Sure Of
Soon Getting A Fresh Supply, We Gave What Water We Had To The Horses, On
Whom The Desert Was Rapidly Leaving Its Mark.
As we sat on the packs
round the tree, eating our salt beef, our black friend, with evident
wonder at our want of watchfulness, took the opportunity of coming
quickly to the ground, only to find that he was tethered to the tree.
His
anger had now subsided, and, though refusing to make friends, he seemed
grateful when I bound up a place on his arm, where he had been hurt in
his descent from the tree. The spears of his tribe were of better
manufacture than those of the ordinary desert man, having bone barbs
lashed on with sinews. The next morning we moved camp, as, from our
position in a hollow, we should have been at a great disadvantage had the
tribe returned to rescue their mate. We found their well, a deep
rock-hole, half filled in with sand, on the southern slope of a stony
sandhill, situated in a small patch of grass and buck-bush. From the hill
above the rock-hole, a prominent bare range of red rock can be seen to
the South bearing 172 degrees to the highest point (these are probably
the Warman Rocks of Tietkens). We were now within seven miles of the
imaginary line forming the boundary between West and South Australia, the
nearest point to that Colony our journeyings took us.
At first we hoped the hole would prove to be a soakage, but in this we
were disappointed, and had to resort to our old methods of box-sinking
and clearing out the sand.
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