een pack, and seven
riding camels, happened on this spring just when they most needed water.

Giles says of it:--

"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
funereal pines. . . . The water is no doubt permanent, for it is supplied
by the drainage of the sandhills which surround it and it rests on a
substratum of impervious clay. It lies exposed to view in a small, open
basin, the water being about only one hundred and fifty yards in
circumference and from two to three feet deep. Further up the slopes at
much higher levels native wells had been sunk in all directions--in each
and all of these there was water. Beyond the immediate precincts of this
open space the scrubs abound. . . . Before I leave this spot I had perhaps
better remark that it might prove a very difficult, perhaps dangerous,
place to any other traveller to attempt to find, because although there
are many white sandhills in the neighbourhood, the open space on which
the water lies is so small in area and so closely surrounded by scrubs,
that it cannot be seen from any conspicuous one, nor can any conspicuous
sandhill, distinguishable at any distance, be seen from it. On the top of
the banks above the wells was a beaten corroboree path, where the denizens
of the desert have often held their feasts and dances. Some grass-trees
grew in the vicinity of this spring to a height of over twenty
feet. . . ."

A charming spot indeed! but we found it to be hardly so cheerful as this
description would lead one to expect. For at first sight the Spring was
dry. The pool of water was now a dry clay-pan; the numerous native wells
were there, but all were dry. The prospect was sufficiently gloomy, for
our water was all but done, and poor Tommy, the pony, in spite of an
allowance of a billy-full per night, was in a very bad way, for we had
travelled nearly one hundred miles from the last water, and if this was
dry we knew no other that we could reach. However, we were not going to
cry before we were hurt and set to work to dig out the soak, and in a
short time were rewarded by the sight of water trickling in on all sides,
and, by roughly timbering the sides, soon had a most serviceable well--a
state of affairs greatly appreciated by Tommy and the camels. This spring
or soakage, whichever it may be, is in black sand, though the sand outside
the little basin is yellowis