Camped Alone On A Spit Of Sand,
Surrounded By A Flat Expanse Of Mud, Broiled By The Sun, Half Blinded
By
the glare of the salt, with no shade but a blanket thrown over a rough
screen of branches, and
Nothing to do but to stoke up the fires, change
the water in the cooling-trough, and blow off the salt from the bottom of
the boilers, he was hardly to be envied. Yet Jim cheerfully undertook the
job and greeted us on our return, after four days, with the smiling remark
that his work had been varied by the necessity of plugging up the bottom
of one of the boilers which had burned through, with a compound (a patent
of his own) formed from strips of his shirt soaked in a stiff paste of
flour. That night we were astonished by the passage of a flight of ducks
over our heads, which Egan saw, and I and Conley heard distinctly.
A detailed account of our wanderings would be as wearying to the reader as
they were to ourselves, a mere monotonous repetition of cooking water and
hunting for "colours" which we never found. Christmas Eve, 1894, saw us in
the vicinity of Mount Monger, where a few men were working on an alluvial
patch and getting a little gold. A lucky storm had filled a deep clay-hole
on the flat running north-west from the hills, and here we were at last
enabled to give the camels a cheap drink; for over six weeks we had not
seen a drop of fresh water beyond what, with infinite labour, we had
condensed, with the one exception of the small rock-hole I found at
Cowarna.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 86 of 468
Words from 23732 to 24017
of 127189
