A few drops
of rain fell; distant rumblings of thunder and flashes of lightning
now cooled the air. While we were at breakfast the next morning, a
thunderstorm came up to us from the west, then suddenly turned away,
only just sprinkling us, though we could see the rain falling heavily
a few yards to the south. We packed up and went off, hoping to find a
better watered region at the hills westwards. There was an
extraordinary mount a little to the west of north from us; it looked
something like a church; it was over twenty miles away: I called it
Mount Peculiar. Leaving the creek on our left, to run itself out into
some lonely flat or dismal swamp, known only to the wretched
inhabitants of this desolate region--over which there seems to brood
an unutterable stillness and a dread repose--we struck into sandhill
country, rather open, covered with the triodia or spinifex, and
timbered with the casuarina or black oak trees. We had scarcely gone
two miles when our old thunderstorm came upon us--it had evidently
missed us at first, and had now come to look for us--and it rained
heavily. The country was so sandy and porous that no water remained on
the surface. We travelled on and the storm travelled with us--the
ground sucking up every drop that fell.
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