"Get off and sit on the ground then," said George, with a little laugh, for now that the time was at hand, when they must learn the best or the worst, he was much the calmer of the two.
"I suppose we shall put the worth of our venture to the test within the next hour. What shall we do if we find nothing after all?"
"Go home again, I suppose," said George, with more calmness than he really felt. "We shall not be a bit worse off than we were before, at any rate."
"No, but we shall have suffered a great deal all in vain, and my disappointment will be none the less keen because we are none the worse off than before."
"You, at any rate, will be worse off than before, old boy, for your hair is half burnt off, and nearly all that fascinating moustache singed away," said George, lightly. Nearly everything had a comic side to it for him, and seeing Alec so gloomy and desponding he tried to cheer him up.
"How can you talk in that careless way of what is so important to us all?"
"To hide what I really feel," said Geordie, quickly, and looking round with a face that was serious for a moment; and then he added, as though to alter the impression his almost involuntary confession had made, "It is no use being down in the mouth before we find we have come in vain, so let us be cheerful till then."
"Oh, I could be cheerful enough if I knew for a certainty that we had come on a fool's errand. It is only this anxiety and uncertainty that I cannot bear."
The Whanga valley, the entrance to which the party had now reached, was a narrow opening, between two great spurs of Tooingoora, which ran back for a mile or two till it ended in a precipitous mass of rocks at the very foot of the great mountain itself. The opening to this valley, which at its beginning was a mere rocky defile, was between two bold crags, the bases of which were clothed in dense green bush, but the summits of which were bare rocks of dazzling white quartz, that reflected the sunlight brilliantly. There was a stream flowing noisily down the centre of the valley, tumbling over the stones and boulders that blocked its course in many tiny cascades. The scenery was very impressive and grand, looking up the narrow defile, for the hills on either side of it rose in huge broken cliffs, throwing the greater part of the valley into deep shadow; but, where in one place it widened out, and a clump of tall quandang trees grew beside the stream, the sun flooded it with brilliant light that fell upon the gleaming, flashing water, making it shine like burnished silver, and mellowing the warm tones of the rocks. Beyond all this, filling up the whole end of the valley, rose the great mass of the mountain high into the clear blue sky, its great white crags of quartz shining like fields of snow or ice upon its hoary summit.
The gorge—it can hardly be called a valley—was very far from level; it rose steeply from the entrance all the way to the end of it, so that riding along it was not at all easy. Murri pointed out in several places signs of the recent presence of myalls, but as there were no camp fires to be seen in the gully, and as he thought the traces were several days old, he said that he believed "black fellow go away two, four days."