ave their meals and to sleep near the packs was a novelty which the
boys very much enjoyed. The blazing fire with the billies catching the
flame, the meal of bread and meat, the hour or two afterwards when they
lolled on the sand while Peter smoked and told yarns, and then the cool
quiet night with the myriad stars above them; these things made the
boys forget the little discomforts they were bound to encounter.

On the second day, towards the middle of the afternoon, a black dot
appeared on the horizon, growing bigger and bigger as they approached
it. The sun beat down on the bare plains and made the whole landscape
quiver with heat, so that things in the distance looked blurred and it
was impossible to tell what they were. In this instance the object
proved to be a group of date-palms growing round a pool made by a
bore-pipe. On all sides of this little oasis stretched the barren
desert, and it was quite easy to believe that no man had been able to
live in that part of the country before this bore had been put down.

Peter told them that the pipe went straight down into the earth for
several thousand feet. Water was struck suddenly. One day, when the
men were boring as usual, a noise came up the pipe like sea waves in a
blow-hole of rock, a sort of gurgling roar accompanied by a rush of
air. Then a column of water, as thick as a man's leg and as strong as
a bar of iron, shot up straight into the air and turned over at the top
like a gigantic umbrella. The water struck the bore staging with such
tremendous force that it smashed a hole clean through a two-inch board
as if a shell had crashed into it, and it wrenched the other boards
from their supports and flung them for a hundred yards, just a useless
mass of splintered wood. The man who was on the platform at the time
heard the water coming and jumped for his life. He was not a moment
too soon. If he had hesitated, he would have been blown to pieces.
The flow is not so strong nowadays, but it still reaches the top of the
pipe and flows over, and enables men and cattle to live in a country
which used to be a waterless desert.

A quarter of a mile north of the date-palms was a sand-hill with what
appeared like a few bushes on it. Sax was looking at this hill when he
saw a coil of smoke rising up out of one of the bushes. He was so
surprised that he called his friend's attention to it.

"I say, Boof," he exclaimed. "'D'you see that smoke over there? Ther