Pushing onwards, our friends spent the first half of the day in climbing rocky peaks, and crossing the dark, rugged sources of creeks, wrapped in their primeval gloom of frizzled, intricate masses of thorny vines and dangerous stinging-trees; and, after making only three miles in six hours, were forced to rest awhile in a ragged gully, walled in by grey slate cliffs, and strewn with glistening blocks of white and “hungry” quartz.
The stinging-tree, which we have twice mentioned in this chapter, is worthy of a few remarks, for it is perhaps the most terrible of all vegetable growths, and is found only in the scrub-country through which Billy and his friend are now forcing their way.
This horrible guardian of the penetralia of the Queensland jungle stands from five to fifteen feet in height, and has a general appearance somewhat similar to that of a small mulberry-tree; but the heart-shaped leaves of the plant before us differ from those of the European fruit just mentioned in that they are larger, and because they look as if manufactured from some light-green, velvety material, such as plush. Their peculiarly soft and inviting aspect is caused by an almost invisible coating of microscopic cilia, and it is to these that the dangerous characteristics of the plant are due. The unhappy wanderer in these wilds, who allows any part of his body to come in contact with those beautiful, inviting tongues of green, soon finds them veritable tongues of fire, and it will be weeks, perhaps months, ere the scorching agony occasioned by their sting is entirely eradicated. Nor are numerous instances wanting of the deaths of men and animals following the act of contact with this terrible lusus naturæ.
Billy and Weevil make more progress during the afternoon, the country being more level and the scrub less thick; but, although both men are inured to fatigue and discomfort of all sorts, they are forced to camp early, after doing another six miles. Ragged, weary, and barefooted,—for even the most imaginative mind could hardly recognize the flabby pieces of water-logged leather that still adhere to the men’s feet as boots,—the two travellers fling themselves down on the dry, sandy bed of a mountain torrent, and scrape the clusters of swollen leeches from their ankles, which are covered with clotted blood, and pick the bush-ticks and scrub-itch insects from their flesh with the point of the long scrub-knife the old digger carries.
As our friends are engaged in this painful but necessary toilet of a voyager through the Queensland scrub, a wild turkey comes blundering by in all the glories of her glossy, blue-black feathers and brilliant red and yellow head,—not the Otis Australasianus which is known to southern settlers as a “wild turkey” and is in reality a bustard, but a true scrub turkey (Telegallus).
Billy is not long in tracking the footprints of the bird back to its enormous mound nest. For this ingenious feathered biped, like her smaller contemporary the scrub hen (Megapodius tumulus), saves herself from the monotonous duty of sitting on her eggs by depositing them in a capital natural incubator, formed of rotting and heated leaves, which she collects into a pile, and arranges so as to do the hatching part of the business for her.
A meal of turkey eggs and roasted “cozzon” berries, whose red clusters are to be seen hanging from parasitic vines upon the great stems around in plentiful profusion, and then the men retire to rest upon their wet blankets, beneath a great ledge of granite, upon whose surface some aboriginal artist has delineated in different colours the admirable representations of immense frogs in various attitudes.
But trouble commences with the morrow; and when old Weevil raises his stiff and patchwork form from the hard couch upon which he has passed the night, he finds Billy, gun in hand, watching something on the dim summit of the cliffs opposite their camp.
“Sh!” observes that individual, without turning his head; “plenty black fellow all about here. D’you see that beggar’s head?”
“Bust ’em!” yawns the old digger, stretching; “they won’t interfere with us. Let’s have tucker, and ‘break camp’ as soon as we can.”