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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So We Quietly
Remained And Tended Our Sick And Dying Ones So Well, That By Night One
Of The Worst Was Got On His Legs Again.
We made them sick with hot
water, butter, and mustard, and gave them injections with the clyster
pipe as well; the only substance we could get out of them was the
chewed-up Gyrostemon ramulosus, which, it being nearly dark, we had
not observed when we camped.
We drove the mob some distance to another
sandhill, where there was very little of this terrible scourge, and
the next morning I was delighted to find that the worst ones and the
others were evidently better, although they were afflicted with
staggers and tremblings of the hind limbs. I was rather undecided what
to do, whether to push farther at once into the desert or retreat to
the last rocky cleft water, now over five-and-twenty miles behind us.
But, as Othello says, once to be in doubt is once to be resolved, and
I decided that, as long as they could stagger, the camels should
stagger on. In about twelve miles Alec Ross and Tommy found a place
where the natives had formerly obtained water by digging. Here we set
to work and dug a well, but only got it down twelve feet by night, no
water making its appearance. The next morning we were at it again, and
at fifteen feet we saw the fluid we were delving for. The water was
yellowish, but pure, and there was apparently a good supply.
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