On either side of the valley, which, sloping westward, opens upon the desert plain below, rise the scarped and pinnacled buttresses of great, crumbling granite cliffs. These grey heights are crowned with a dark red stratum of rock, which Claude recognizes as part of the desert sandstone formation, which has, in all probability, at one period covered the greater portion of Northern Central Queensland.
It is now getting late in the day, so a council is held as to whether to retire campwards by the road they have come, or by proceeding down the valley to return on the outside of the hill, which they will then have passed completely through. The latter route is quickly selected, and the rosy tints of sundown are just beginning to stain the whole landscape when our friends commence clambering over the boulders towards the lower ground. The route selected lies over and amongst enormous masses of coarse-grained porphyritic granite, from whose weather-worn surfaces great square crystals of feldspar project, catching the sun’s ruby rays and flashing them back amidst the glints of light off flakes of ice-like mica. And Claude, looking round him, thinks of the valley of gems into which Sinbad was carried by the mighty Roc, and how, perhaps, Dr. Dyesart may have also recalled that wondrous Eastern story, when he, the first and solitary explorer of the mountain, saw the jewel-like crystals blazing round him on the rocks. The descent to the valley is not by any means so facile as the bird’s-eye view taken from above seemed to promise; and a small precipice presently necessitates our friends to travel along to the left, beneath the undercliff upon which they had emerged when leaving the tunnel. A hundred yards brings them to a great black buttress, which, projecting from the cliff, threatens to bar the way. But the active Billy, who declares he sees signs of the doctor having been in that direction, soon finds a narrow ledge, and by its means the rocky corner is safely rounded, after a rather risky passage. And here the men are suddenly arrested in their further progress by a most strangely beautiful sight.
A large portion of the cliff immediately before them, probably from the action of some ancient earthquake, has fallen forwards into the valley below, leaving exposed a bay or recess about three hundred feet in height and nearly as much across. The walls of this kind of alcove are formed of some dark rock, but here and there it is blotched and clouded with an almost luminous coating of iridescent colours—such as one sees on soap-bubbles and decaying glass—that burns and shimmers in green, golden, and violet hues, as though a hundred rainbows were trembling on the sombre surface of the mountain steep.
Around the summit of the semi-circular precipice is suspended a kind of rocky cornice composed of great icicle-like pendants, as if some mighty torrent of lava plunging over the cliff had suddenly cooled in mid-air and become converted into stone.
Some of these o’erhangings appear to be tipped with burnished copper, others with silver, others again shine bright and golden against the dark, purple shadows behind. And all of them in the evening light—which bathes the whole scene with a soft crimson veil—glow and blush like molten drops of metals oozing from the edge of the wonderful rocky valance above.
Some little time elapses before the men have recovered sufficiently to speak; and then it is the sun which, sinking with true tropical celerity, releases them from the enthralling beauty of the scene. And, as the glowing hues fade into cold indigo shadow, each individual member of the party experiences that curious emotion—a mixed feeling of relief and disappointment—which some of our readers may remember to have been keenly sensible of, when, as children, the green-baize curtain dropped slowly upon the limelit fairyland of their first pantomime.
Then are three tongues unloosed, and three pair of legs hurry their owners toward the darkening cliffs.
Claude, being gifted with a scientific and artistic mind, forgets to think about the practical value of the discovery, and exclaims characteristically, “That is beautiful! I wonder what’s the cause of those colours!”
Billy, remembering the prismatic tints of a material sulphide known to miners by the name of “peacock ore,” concludes that what lies before him is an immense deposit of the same, and shouts gleefully, “Copper!” To which Williams, who likes to have a good-humoured “dig” at his black companion when he advances any opinion upon mining matters, observes “Grandmother!” and further explains, for Claude’s benefit, “that them colours are iron oxides. Couldn’t think at first where I’d seen the same kind of thing before,” he adds, as he stoops to pick up a piece of stone, “but I recollect now. It was just the same as this here on the top of Mount Morgan, when they first opened up the top bench, only on a much smaller scale.”
“Mount Morgan eh!” exclaims Claude, as he hears the old authority at his side compare this discovery of theirs to the richest goldmine in Australia.