In the afternoon a halt was made and the Prince alighted and paid a visit to a rude encampment of aborigines, who had travelled a hundred miles on foot to meet him. They performed a number of weird ceremonial dances before him, and gave an exhibition of their skill in the throwing of boomerangs and spears. The performers were almost completely naked men and boys, painted all over with red and other brilliant patches on a whitish ground, whose only garment was a scanty rag of dirty cotton cloth that could hardly be said even to encompass the waist. The dances were slow, the performers sometimes stealing in single file round a circle, sometimes springing as if to the attack, the while incantations were chanted by miserable bundles of savage humanity, feminine as well as masculine, who squatted upon the ground. The boomerang-throwing was a much more lively affair. The air hummed with sharp wooden blades the size and weight of reaping-hooks. About a dozen performers operated simultaneously and each threw quite a number of these blades in quick succession to immense heights, where they hovered like hawks, eventually to descend with uncanny speed in a series of crooked swirls and side-long rushes. The circles described were such that quite a wide area was swept by flying blades each of which travelled on a complicated orbit of its own, of extraordinary speed, the sharp edge continually leading. It was explained that these boomerangs were of the hunting type, and were used in practice chiefly against flights of duck, the birds taking them for hawks and keeping low and thus within range when they were in the air. The spear-throwing was also interesting. The spears consisted of straight wooden shafts, like slim but heavy bean-sticks, with a tapering charred point sharpened to acuteness, and tail winged with a thin wooden slip the size of a biggish paper-knife. These spears were thrown with marvellous force and precision, with an action like that of overhand bowling, a sack stuffed with salt-bush branches and crudely painted to represent a human face, being transfixed again and again, in the centre, at sixty yards. These wretched people appear to be rapidly dying out despite liberal grants from the Commonwealth and State Governments to educate and feed them. In the south they seem to be entirely incapable of learning even how to cook or wash or build themselves shelters. In the north they are less degraded and find employment on cattle-stations where some of them make excellent stock-drivers, learning to ride well and handle animals. [Illustration: CROSSING THE NULLARBOR PLAIN] [Illustration: ABORIGINAL DANCE]