Cautiously peering through the prickly palms and brushwood, our black friend endeavours to find an open space through which he can proceed on his way; but so dense is the mass of vegetation on all sides that there appears but one road to take, that offered to him by the lake itself.
It speaks well for the superstitionless training Billy had received at his late master’s hands that he at last determined to take water, as a means of continuing his journey towards the sounds that still, intermittently, make themselves heard above the various voices of the forest. For little in nature can surpass the awful, supernatural look of these black, silent jungle lakes, and there was something particularly “uncanny” about the appearance of this one. And when, in addition to this, there was the certainty of those dark waters being the abode of more or less numerous swimming snakes, also the grim possibility of some frightful veengnaan—the local Australian edition of a Scotch “water-kelpie”—lurking in those gloomy depths, we may safely say that it showed Billy to be possessed of a cool courage of no ordinary sort when he determined on trusting his fatigued and wounded body to its inky bosom.
Quickly making up his mind, he wriggles through the springy mass of steaming vegetation upon the edge of the cliff before him,—losing quite a number of square inches of his fast-disappearing garments in the process,—and emerges from the shadows into the fierce midday heat of a tropical winter day.
A drop of twenty feet only has to be made to reach the silent waters at this point, for the storm creek has cut through the brim of the crater basin a dozen feet or more; and Billy is just about to make the necessary dive—as the prickly vines around offer no friendly chance of descending by their means—when he pauses to listen once more.
There are two sounds now audible above the ordinary murmurings of the forest. The clink! clink! of the noise he has followed now comes clearly upon the ear, and he recognizes it as proceeding from the pick of some prospector or miner working a creek or gully below, and beyond the lake. There is a cheerful ring about it that strikes a pleasant chord of remembrance in the mind of the poor, hunted wretch who now hears it; for it reminds him of happy, hopeful days with his old master. But the other sound that is upon the air, and whose purport Billy recognizes as easily as that of the unseen worker’s blows,—there is no mistaking those musical whisperings that are just audible, and seem to come from that broken mass of piled-up grey and purple rock that towers above the scrub a little distance off upon his right hand. The “banked-up fires” of Billy’s savage nature burst up into an energetic blaze as he hears the voices of a party of natives arranging themselves into a half circle, with the intention of surrounding and capturing some prey they have discovered. Billy correctly guesses the purport of these signals, but does not understand the exact meaning of the words, for he knows little or nothing of the coastal languages. What the natives on the rocky hill have in view is evident: it is the busy worker in the gully beyond. Billy forgets his fatigue as he glances round and satisfies himself that he has the start of the hunters, and then plunging into the water, with marvellously little noise considering the height from which he has descended, swims after the manner of a dog rapidly round the lake, keeping close to the cliffs on the side nearest to the approaching blacks.
The natives of most countries situated in the southern hemisphere, ere foreign civilization has crushed them in her deadly embrace, are good swimmers, but some of the inland tribes of Australian aborigines are perhaps able to produce the best of these,—men who can beat even the marvellous aquatic feats of Tongan, Samoan, and Maoris. The blacks of some portions of the central wilds have a fish-like proclivity for swimming and remaining for a long time under water that is simply marvellous.
In the muddy water-holes of the great, intermittently-flowing rivers of Northern Australia, we have seen aborigines successfully chase the finny denizens of the deep pools, and bring them otter-like to the shore in their white-toothed jaws. And many a hunted black has saved himself from the cruel rifle of squatter invaders of his native land by pretending to fall as if shot into a river or water-hole, and remaining, apparently, at the bottom. They manage this artifice in various ways: sometimes by swimming an incredible distance under water to a sheltering weedy patch or bed of rushes, where they can remain hidden; but more often by plastering their heads and faces with mud, and remaining, sometimes for hours, with only their nose above water, in some corner where floating leaves, grass, or the like, afford a temporary blind to baffle their relentless foes.
Billy, although by no means as perfect a swimmer as some of his countrymen, showed great skill in the way in which he noiselessly moved through the water to the opposite side of the black lake, and hardly a ripple disturbed its placid surface, above which his dark, glistening head only thrice briefly appeared during his swim.
Arrived at the point he had started for, the young man slowly raises his face again into the hot sunshine behind the leafy cover of a fallen mass of enormous stagshorn ferns, and carefully reconnoitres the summit of the opposite cliffs for any enemies who may be watching him.
None are in sight, so Billy leaves the water and proceeds to climb the rough side of the old volcano crater, and as the rocks are lower and less precipitous than at the place where he dived into the lake, he soon reaches the shelter of the scrub once more. A kind of rugged giants’ staircase, which the overflow from the lake has cut in the ancient lava covering of the mountain, now leads Billy down into a wide, wild-looking gorge, about two hundred feet below the surface of the dark tarn above. Through the centre of this deep gully, and flanked with a dense growth of gracefully festooned trees, runs a clear, silver stream, with a cool, refreshing, rushing voice, amongst the smooth, rounded bounders in its course. Taking its rise in some limestone formation in the unknown depths of the jungles beyond, it has painted its rocky bed of a pine white with a calcareous deposit, that stands out in strong relief to the sombre hues of the overhanging cliffs that here and there jut out boldly from the verdure on either side.