“When I carry the doctor I pikaued (Anglicé, carried) all I cared about in the world. ’Spose that made it easy,” Billy replies simply, and leaning his head upon his arms against a rock, he allows his exuberance of emotion caused by the painful remembrance to wash itself away in tears.
As Angland regards the weeping black he cannot but feel half ashamed of his own want of feeling. “Surely this is rather incongruous,” he thinks, “that Billy, who after all is only an aboriginal servant of the dead man, should thus appropriate the position of chief mourner, whilst I can look on with only a strange, solemn feeling in my heart, and certainly with dry eyes. But it seems all like a dream to me. Of course, however, with Billy it’s very different.”
Williams calls at this instant and disturbs the young man’s meditations.
“Look here, Mr. Angland!” The old miner’s short, thick thumb points to a copy of the secret map which he holds in his toil-worn hands.
“Here’s where we’ve got to go; follow the dotted line. Right up the gully there.” The old man points to a narrow opening in the side of the hill, not far from where they are standing.
“Yes, but we must find out where this place marked by the cross is, Williams,—the point of departure, you know.”
“It’s here, lad. The doctor knew the boy’d lead us to where the accident happened; and see, there’s the gully. A storm creek running from some hollow in the hill I take it to be.”
Billy meanwhile observes what is going on with some considerable surprise, for this is the first inkling he has received of the existence of a map of the hill—so carefully had Dyesart apparently guarded the secret that he wished only to reach his sister’s child.
The men now move on again, Williams leading, and enter a dark, gloomy defile, the walls of which, rising to a height of some eighty feet, are composed of rain-furrowed masses of hard, grey mud. Enormous flakes and slabs of transparent gypsum protrude from the sun-dried mass in places, and some of these, catching the rays of the afternoon sun, blaze and scintillate like gems of priceless value. The gorge is, in fact, just what Williams has termed it, a storm creek, and the dark cliffs of hardened clay on either hand are formed of débris which has washed down from an open basin or depression in the centre of the mount.
After following the watercourse upwards for two or three hundred yards, Claude and his companions find themselves in a great, crater-like valley, about three hundred yards across, grey and blasted, a picture of desolation. On all sides rise the sun-scarred domes of mud-springs of various sizes, some of which are twenty feet in height, but all appear non-active; in consequence, no doubt, of the long drought. Around the valley, across which Williams proceeds to lead the way, stopping here and there to consult his map or examine a stone, is an encircling, battlemented array of strangely weird and broken cliffs, some three hundred feet in height, of a hard, flinty rock, varying in colour from light red to pure white. At intervals along the scarped and tortured summit of the precipices strange, turret-headed peaks rise like giant sentries posted upon the heights to guard its sacred loneliness, and these, as the sun lowers in the heavens, cast protracted shadows over the silent, ghastly valley below. In many places heaps of honey-combed boulders of a kind of quartzite, which have fallen from the overhanging cliffs, form slopes that reach halfway up the walls of this wild-looking amphitheatre, and here and there the explorers have to turn to avoid the mysterious openings of vast, ancient fumaroles, whose orifices and walls are grandly blotched with black, purple, and Indian-red incrustations.