Peter told them that the pipe went straight down into the earth for several thousand feet. Water was struck suddenly. One day, when the men were boring as usual, a noise came up the pipe like sea waves in a blow-hole of rock, a sort of gurgling roar accompanied by a rush of air. Then a column of water, as thick as a man's leg and as strong as a bar of iron, shot up straight into the air and turned over at the top like a gigantic umbrella. The water struck the bore staging with such tremendous force that it smashed a hole clean through a two-inch board as if a shell had crashed into it, and it wrenched the other boards from their supports and flung them for a hundred yards, just a useless mass of splintered wood. The man who was on the platform at the time heard the water coming and jumped for his life. He was not a moment too soon. If he had hesitated, he would have been blown to pieces. The flow is not so strong nowadays, but it still reaches the top of the pipe and flows over, and enables men and cattle to live in a country which used to be a waterless desert.
A quarter of a mile north of the date-palms was a sand-hill with what appeared like a few bushes on it. Sax was looking at this hill when he saw a coil of smoke rising up out of one of the bushes. He was so surprised that he called his friend's attention to it.
"I say, Boof," he exclaimed. "'D'you see that smoke over there? There must be a camp or something."
Peter heard the remark and laughed. "D'you know what that is?" he asked.
"Why, bushes, of course," replied Sax.
"And what d'you reckon it is?" asked Peter again, turning to Vaughan.
Young Vaughan looked intently at the sand-hill where the smoke was coming from. He heard a dog bark, and then thought he saw a little black human figure crawl out of one of the bushes, followed by another and bigger figure. It was all so far away that he wasn't sure that he had seen correctly, so he answered with hesitation; "It looks as if there were people in those bushes. They don't live there, do they, Peter?"
"They're not bushes," explained the man. "They're what we call 'wurlies'. They're sort of little huts the blacks live in. You'll see quite enough of them before you've been in this country long, I promise you."
The boys wanted to go over at once and see, so Peter good-naturedly went with them.
The wurlies were made from branches pulled from the ragged trees which grew around, and stuck in the sand with their tops brought together. This framework was covered with bits of old bag or blanket. The whole thing was the shape of a pudding-basin turned upside down, and was not more than three feet high in the middle or four feet wide at the bottom.