Australia Twice Traversed - The Romance Of Exploration, Through Central South Australia, And Western Australia, From 1872 To 1876 By Ernest Giles
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What's The Use Of A Paltry Rock-Hole?"
Then He Said Solemnly, "Ah, Mr. Gile, You Not Religious."
On the eleventh day the plains died off, and we re-entered a new bed
of scrubs - again consisting of mallee, casuarinas, desert sandal-wood,
and quandong-trees of the same family; the ground was overgrown with
spinifex.
By the night of the twelfth day from the dam, having daily
increased our rate of progress, we had traversed scrubs more
undulating than previously, consisting of the usual kinds of trees. At
sundown we descended into a hollow; I thought this would prove the bed
of another salt lake, but I found it to be a rain-water basin or very
large clay-pan, and although there were signs of the former presence
of natives, the whole basin, grass, and herbage about it, were as dry
as the desert around. Having found a place where water could lodge, I
was certainly disappointed at finding none in it, as this showed that
no rain whatever had fallen here, where it might have remained, when
we had good but useless showers immediately upon leaving the dam. From
the appearance of the vegetation no rains could possibly have visited
this spot for many months, if not years. The grass was white and dry,
and ready to blow away with any wind.
(ILLUSTRATION: IN QUEEN VICTORIA'S DESERT.)
We had now travelled 242 miles from the little dam, and I thought it
advisable here to give our lion-hearted camels a day's respite, and to
apportion out to them the water that some of them had carried for that
purpose.
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