The thin
crust of earth had given way beneath the animal's hindquarters as it
grazed over the turf, and before it could recover itself it had slipped
bodily through the hole thus formed, and was standing on the rocky bed of
the underground river, with its head only in the upper air.
The poor brute was perishing for want of food and water. All around the
hole, as far as the head could reach, the turf was eaten, bare, and
although it was standing in a couple of feet of water it could not get at
it. While the Maluka went for help I brought handfuls of grass, and his
hat full of water, again and again, and was haunted for days with the
remembrance of those pleading eyes and piteous, nickering lips.
The whole camp, black and white, came to the rescue but it was an awful
work getting the exhausted creature out of its death-trap. The hole had
to be cut back to a solid ridge of rocky soil, saplings cut to form a
solid slope from the bed of the river to the ground above, and the poor
brute roped and literally hauled up the slope by sheer force and strength
of numbers. After an hour's digging, dragging, and rope-pulling, the
horse was standing on solid turf, a new pool had been added to the
Springs, and none of us had much hankering for riding over springy
country.
The hour's work among the pools awakened the latent geologist in all of
us, excepting Dan, and set us rooting at the bottom of one of the pools
for a piece of the terraced limestone.
It was difficult to dislodge, and our efforts reminded Dan of a night
spent in the camp of a geologist - a man with many letters after his name.
"Had the chaps heaving rocks round for him half his time," he said.
"Couldn't see much sense in it meself." Dan spoke of the geologist as
"one of them old Alphabets." "Never met a chap with so many letters in
his brand," he explained. "He was one of them taxydermy blokes, you
know, that's always messing round with stones and things."
Out of the water, the opal tints died out of the limestone, and the
geologist in us went to sleep again when we found that all we had for our
trouble was a piece of dirty-looking rock. Like Dan, we saw little sense
in "heaving rocks round," and went back to the camp and the business of
packing up for the homestead.
About next midday we rode into the homestead thoroughfare, where Cheon
and Tiddle'ums welcomed us with enthusiasm, but Cheon's enthusiasm turned
to indignation when he found we were only in for a day or two.
