J. G. Whittier.
IXTY miles in a southerly direction from the place where Inspector Puttis met with the adventure related in our last chapter, the figure of a man is reposing beside a silent rocky pool, in the heart of a dense jungle. The tropic vegetation around him is part of the same straggling line of “scrub-country” that covers the great, rugged shoulders of the coast range of Northern Queensland with a soft green mantle of indescribable grandeur and beauty. Enormous fig-trees (Ficus), with gigantic, buttressed stems, tower on all sides into the hanging gardens of climbing ferns, orchids, and creepers that swing above in mid-air, and provide the dark, moist soil beneath with a perennial shelter from the sun’s rays.
Save where a brawling brooklet has cut a rugged pathway for itself through the dense undergrowth, or a hoary monarch of the forest has succumbed to age and insect foes and fallen to the ground, no road through the matted growths around seems passable but for the smallest animals. Yet it is in these gloomy wilds that some of the tribes of Queensland aboriginals find their only safe sanctuary to-day, from the white settlers who have driven them from their old homes in the open country at the foot of the mountain chain. It is midday, but the green shadows of the leafy canopy overhead would render the reading of a newspaper difficult work. But although so dark, the forest is not silent. Its great pulses throb and murmur with the pleonastic signs of tropic life. There comes upon the ear the thousand tiny voices of insects and of birds, swelling and dying in a soft-toned lullaby chorus, which, like the murmur of the coast-waves ten miles to the eastward, is never ceasing.
It does not require a second glance at the lonely figure at the little rocky pool to ascertain that it is that of an aboriginal. He is dressed in the ragged remains of a coarse woollen shirt and trousers, both of which garments are so torn with the thousand thorns of the thickets their wearer has just traversed that the wonder is that they still cling to his thin and emaciated body.
Presently the black raises himself from the ground, where he has been reposing at full length upon his back, with his arms extended at right angles to his body, after the fashion of aboriginals who have undergone excessive fatigue, and totters towards the little water-hole. First examining the sand upon its banks for footmarks, he next proceeds to bathe his bruised and bleeding limbs. The man before us is Billy, the late Dr. Dyesart’s “boy,” and he is almost in as bad a plight as when we saw him on the eventful morning by Paree River’s side, when the explorer saved the wounded child from the uplifted axe of the squatter’s tracker. Billy is now a young man of twenty-four years of age, well-built, active, and handsome for an aboriginal; but the privations and trouble he has lately undergone have pulled him down considerably. After refreshing himself at the pool, he sits down on a fallen tree, and, feeling in his pockets, smiles to himself as he finds that he still possesses a pipe, tobacco, and matches. He is too fatigued to search for food yet awhile, and here is something to stave off the feeling of hunger for a time. Odd as it may appear to those of our readers who do not know Australia intimately, Billy, although a native, and born a warragal, or wild native, was almost as helpless as a white man in this “scrub” country, as regards finding the means of sustenance. Take an aboriginal from the semi-desert interior of Australia, and place him in the coastal jungles of the north-eastern shores of the great island, and he is hardly more capable of getting his living there than a European, who then saw the “bush” for the first time, would be under similar circumstances. The fauna and flora were all new to Billy; even the snakes were different. This was bad enough, but, in addition, he had only just escaped from remorseless enemies, who might even now be again upon his tracks. The dependent life he had led for sixteen years with his old master was much against him, now that he was thrown upon his own resources. Much of his late life had of course been in the “wilds,” but they were very different to those that now formed his hiding-place. And, besides, there had generally been flour galore for “damper” and “Johnnie-cake” making, and always plenty of powder and shot as a dernier ressort with which to procure a meal.
The young man sits smoking and thinking for a while, and then falls to digging away at the rotten wood upon which he is seated,—a small, toothsome luncheon of fat, oily grubs rewarding his operations. Suddenly he stops, and withdrawing the pipe from his mouth listens intently. His marvellous powers of hearing have detected a distant sound that, falling on the tympanum of a European’s ear, would have become jumbled up and lost amidst the confusing buzz of flies and other myriads of tiny noises around him. What the sound is caused by Billy cannot tell, but it is a stationary one, and in a different direction from that by which any of his pursuers are likely to approach. It may be natives chopping down a tree for honey, but it is almost too sharp in tone for that. After listening awhile the young man rises, and, having determined to ascertain the cause of the phenomenon, begins to crawl down the bed of the little rocky creek nearby in the direction of the curious sounds.
Ragged fragments of basalt, straggling tendrils of sharp-toothed lawyer-vines, and other impediments, make his progress slow and painful; but after creeping along the half-dried-up course of the torrent about a quarter of a mile, where hundreds of mosquitoes and leeches combined, in a sort of guerilla warfare, to attack the black’s arms, legs, and face, he at last finds himself on the edge of a cliff, above one of those curious, circular, crater-lakes that abound in one part of the great uplands of the wild coast range.
Black walls of basalt rise more or less perpendicularly around the dark, indigo water at their feet. Here and there the ancient lava has crystallized into prismatic columns, or weathered into picturesque battlements and projections, which stand up, like the ruins of some old abbey, above the feathery palms and undergrowth that struggles down the precipitous cliffs in places in avalanches of sunlit emerald or shady o’erhangings of brown and purple.
The dark mountain tarn is some two hundred yards across, and opposite to where the stream, whose bed has hitherto been Billy’s road through the jungle, joins it, the surrounding wall of cliffs seems to fall away, as far as one can make out in the shadows, as if the waters of the lake there found a means of exit.