At the station of Sooro and Rayray Guddy little change has been effected
since I last described them, and about the same number of men are
stationed there; but at Undel Wells, or Guinea-fowl Plain, as it was
formerly called, the place was changed beyond all recognition. When last I
was there it was a quiet valley, with a few Shohos watering their cattle
at a scanty and dirty well. My own party was the only evidence of the
British expedition. Now this was all changed. No city in the days of the
gold-mining rush in Australia ever sprung into existence more suddenly.
Here are long lines of transport-animals, here are commissariat-tents and
stores, here a camp of the pioneers. The whole of the trees and brushwood
have been cleared away. Here is the watering-place, with its troughs for
animals and its tubs for men—the one supplied by one of Bastier’s
chain-pumps, a gigantic specimen of which used to pour out a cataract of
water for the delectation of the visitors to the Paris Exhibition—the
other by one of the little American pumps. Everything works as quietly and
easily as if the age of the station was to be counted by months instead of
by days.
I found that the telegraph is making rapid progress. The wire now works as
far as Sooro, and is also erected downwards from Senafe to Rayray Guddy.
It is a very fine copper wire, and in the midst of the lofty perpendicular
rocks of the Sooro Pass it looks, as it goes in long stretches from angle
to angle, with the sun shining bright upon it, like the glistening thread
of some great spider.
It would have been long since laid to Senafe, but the greatest difficulty
has occurred in obtaining poles, all those sent from Bombay having been
thrown overboard to lighten the vessel in which they were shipped upon an
occasion of her running aground. It has been found impossible to procure
the poles for the remaining distance; and I hear that a wire coated with
india-rubber is to be laid a few inches under the soil.
Senafe itself is but little altered. The 10th Native Infantry are still in
their old camp. The 3d Native Cavalry have gone out about eight miles from
here to a spot called Goose Plain, and the sappers and miners are encamped
in the old lines of the 3d. The 33d lines are in a plain close to, but a
little beyond, the old camp, and concealed from view until one has passed
it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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