"
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.
Pages:
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256