Saleh Being A Good Mussulman, Was Only Just (If) In Time To Run Up And Cut The Bird's Throat Before It Died, Otherwise His Religious Scruples Would Have Prevented Him From Eating Any Of It.

All the meat he did eat, which was smoked beef, had been killed in the orthodox Mohammedan style, either by himself or one of his co-religionists at Beltana.

It was cured and carried on purpose. None of the natives I had formerly seen, or any others, made their appearance, and the party were disappointed by not seeing the charming young Polly, my description of whom had greatly raised their curiosity.

(ILLUSTRATION: WYNBRING ROCK.)

On the 26th of June we departed from the pretty little oasis of Wynbring, leaving its isolated and water-giving rock, in the silence and solitude of its enveloping scrubs, abandoning it once again, to the occupation of primeval man, a fertile little gem in a desolate waste, where the footsteps of the white man had never been seen until I came, where the wild emu, and the wilder black man, continually return to its life-sustaining rock, where the aboriginal inhabitants will again and again indulge in the wild revelries of the midnight corroborree dance, and where, in an existence totally distinct from ours of civilisation, men and women live and love, and eat and drink, and sleep and die. But the passions are the same in all phases of the life of the human family, the two great master motives, of love and hunger, being the mainspring of all the actions of mankind.

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