Long Before The Sun Himself Appears, Those Avant-Couriers Of His Fiery Might, Heated Glow, And Feverish Breeze, Came Rustling

Through the foliage of the mallee-trees, which give out the semblance of a mournful sigh, as though they too

Suffered from the heat and thirst of this desolate region, in which they are doomed by fate to dwell, and as though they desired to let the wanderers passing amongst them know, that they also felt, and were sorry for, our woes.

The morning of March 31st was exceedingly hot, the thermometer at dawn standing at 86 degrees. We were up and after the camels and horses long before daylight, tracking them by the light of burning torches of great bunches and boughs of the mallee trees - these burn almost as well green as dry, from the quantity of aromatic eucalyptic oil contained in them - and enormous plots of spinifex which we lighted as we passed.

Having secured all the animals, we started early, and were moving onwards before sunrise. From Whitegin I found we had come on a nearly north-east course, and at twenty-eight miles from thence the scrubs fell off a trifle in height and density. This morning our guide travelled much straighter than was usual with him, and it was evident he had now no doubt that he was going in the right direction. About ten o'clock, after we had travelled thirteen or fourteen miles, Jimmy uttered an exclamation, pointed out something to us, and declared that it was Wynbring. Then I could at once perceive how excessively inaccurate, the old gentleman's account of Wynbring had been, for instead of its being a mountain, it was simply a round bare mass of stone, standing in the centre of an open piece of country, surrounded as usual by the scrubs. When we arrived at the rock, we found the large creek channel, promised us had microscopicated itself down to a mere rock-hole, whose dimensions were not very great. The rock itself was a bare expanse of granite, an acre or two in extent, and was perhaps fifty feet high, while the only receptacle for water about it was a crevice forty feet long, by four feet wide, with a depth of six feet in its deepest part. The hole was not full, but it held an ample supply for all our present requirements.

There were a few low sandhills near, ornamented with occasional mulga-trees, and they made the place very pretty and picturesque. There were several old and new native gunyahs, or houses, if such a term can be applied to these insignificant structures. Australian aborigines are a race who do not live in houses at all, but still the common instincts of humanity induce all men to try and secure some spot of earth which, for a time at least, they may call home; and though the nomadic inhabitants or owners of these Australian wilds, do not remain for long in any one particular place, in consequence of the game becoming too wild or destroyed, or water being used up or evaporated, yet, wherever they are located, every man or head of a family has his home and his house, to which he returns in after seasons. The natives in this, as in most other parts of Australia, seldom hunt without making perpetual grass or spinifex fires, and the traveller in these wilds may be always sure that the natives are in the neighbourhood when he can see the smokes, but it by no means follows that because there are smokes there must be water. An inversion of the terms would be far more correct, and you might safely declare that because there is water there are sure to be smokes, and because there are smokes there are sure to be fires and because there are fires there are sure to be natives, the present case being no exception to the rule, as several columns of smoke appeared in various directions. Old Jimmy's native name was Nanthona; in consequence he was generally called Anthony, but he liked neither; he preferred Jimmy, and asked me always to call him so. When at Youldeh the old fellow had mentioned this spot, Wynbring, as the farthest water he knew to the eastwards, and now that we had arrived at it, he declared that beyond it there was nothing; it was the ultima thule of all his geographical ideas; he had never seen, heard, or thought of anything beyond it. It was certainly a most agreeable little oasis, and an excellent spot for an explorer to come to in such a frightful region. Here were the three requisites that constitute an explorer's happiness - that is to say, wood, water, and grass, there being splendid green feed and herbage on the few thousand acres of open ground around the rock. The old black guide had certainly brought us to this romantic and secluded little spot, with, I suppose I may say, unerring precision, albeit he wound about so much on the road, and made the distance far greater than it should have been. I was, however, struck with admiration at his having done so at all, and how he or any other human being, not having the advantages of science at his command to teach him, by the use of the heavenly bodies, how to find the position of any locality, could possibly return to the places we had visited in such a wilderness, especially as it was done by the recollection of spots which, to a white man, have no special features and no guiding points, was really marvellous. We had travelled at least 120 miles eastward from Youldeh, and when there, this old fellow had told us that he had not visited any of the places he was going to take me to since his boyhood; this at the very least must have been forty years ago, for he was certainly fifty, if not seventy, years old.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 129 of 200
Words from 130980 to 131980 of 204780