Australia Twice Traversed: The Romance of Exploration, Being a Narrative Compiled from the Journals of Five Exploring Expeditions into and Through Central South Australia and Western Australia, from 1872 to 1876Giles, Ernest
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Australia Twice Traversed: The Romance of Exploration, Being a Narrative Compiled from the Journals of Five Exploring Expeditions into and Through Central South Australia and Western Australia, from 1872 to 1876
Giles, Ernest
Australia -- Discovery and exploration
So delightful indeed was the evening that it was late when we gave
ourselves up to the oblivion of slumber, beneath the cool and starry
sky. We made a fire against a log about eighteen inches thick; this
was a limb from an adjacent blood-wood or red gum-tree, and this
morning we discovered that it had been chopped off its parent stem
either with an axe or tomahawk, and carried some forty or fifty yards
from where it had originally fallen. This seemed very strange; in the
first place for natives, so far out from civilisation as this, to have
axes or tomahawks; and in the second place, to chop logs or boughs off
a tree was totally against their practice. By sunrise we were upon the
summit of the mountain; it consisted of enormous blocks and boulders
of red granite, so riven and fissured that no water could possibly
lodge upon it for an instant. I found it also to be highly magnetic,
there being a great deal of ironstone about the rocks. It turned the
compass needle from its true north point to 10 degrees south of west,
but the attraction ceased when the compass was removed four feet from
contact with the rocks. The view from this mount was of singular and
almost awful beauty. The mount, and all the others connected with it,
rose simply like islands out of a vast ocean of scrub. The beauty of
the locality lay entirely within itself. Innumerable red ridges
ornamented with fig-trees, rising out of green and grassy slopes, met
the eye everywhere to the east, north, and northeast, and the country
between each was just sufficiently timbered to add a charm to the
view. But the appearance of water still was wanting; no signs of it,
or of any basin or hollow that could hold it, met the gaze in any
direction, This alone was wanting to turn a wilderness into a garden.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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