However, Even I, Soon Ceased To Doubt, For Tommy Came Rushing Through The Scrubs Full Gallop, And, Between A Scream And A Howl, Yelled Out Quite Loud Enough Now Even For Me To Hear, "Water!

Water!

Plenty water here! come on! come on! this way! this way! come on, Mr. Giles! mine been find 'em plenty water!" I checked his excitement a moment and asked whether it was a native well he had found, and should we have to work at it with the shovel? Tommy said, "No fear shovel, that fellow water sit down meself (i.e. itself) along a ground, camel he drink 'em meself." Of course we turned the long string after him. Soon after he left us he had ascended the white sandhill whither Mr. Tietkens had sent him, and what sight was presented to his view! A little open oval space of grass land, half a mile away, surrounded entirely by pine-trees, and falling into a small funnel-shaped hollow, looked at from above. He said that before he ascended the sandhill he had seen the tracks of an emu, and on descending he found the bird's track went for the little open circle. He then followed it to the spot, and saw a miniature lake lying in the sand, with plenty of that inestimable fluid which he had not beheld for more than 300 miles. He watered his camel, and then rushed after us, as we were slowly passing on ignorantly by this life-sustaining prize, to death and doom. Had Mr. Young steered rightly the day before - whenever it was his turn during that day I had had to tell him to make farther south - we should have had this treasure right upon our course; and had I not checked his incorrect steering in the evening, we should have passed under the northern face of a long, white sandhill more than two miles north of this water. Neither Tommy nor anybody else would have seen the place on which it lies, as it is completely hidden in the scrubs; as it was, we should have passed within a mile of it if Mr. Tietkens had not sent Tommy to look out, though I had made up my mind not to enter the high sandhills beyond without a search in this hollow, for my experience told me if there was no water in it, none could exist in this terrible region at all, and we must have found the tracks of natives, or wild dogs or emus leading to the water. Such characters in the book of Nature the explorer cannot fail to read, as we afterwards saw numerous native foot-marks all about. When we arrived with the camels at this newly-discovered liquid gem, I found it answered to Tommy's description. It is the most singularly-placed water I have ever seen, lying in a small hollow in the centre of a little grassy flat, and surrounded by clumps of the funereal pines, "in a desert inaccessible, under the shade of melancholy boughs." While watering my little camel at its welcome waters, I might well exclaim, "In the desert a fountain is springing" - though in this wide waste there's too many a tree.

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