“Why, there must be water here, or the animals wouldn’t be so contented. Get enough juice out of what they’re eating, I suppose,” he added, after a few minutes’ more thought. “Well, this is a hundred times better than the salt desert, and there must be water in the valleys over yonder. How blue it all looks! That doesn’t seem as if there were trees, because they’d look green. But there must be valleys because there are mountains, and—Here, I say, Ned, don’t snore like that,” he said aloud. “Wake up, lazy! It’s ever so late.”
His words having no effect, he reached out one foot and gave the boy such a vigorous push that Ned sat up, staring.
“Who—Here, you, Chris, why did you kick me like that?” he cried.
“I didn’t kick, only pushed. To wake you up. You can’t sleep all day. Oh, I say, what a face you’ve got!”
Ned, who had roused up at once, clapped his hands to the part of his person alluded to, and retaliated.
“So have you got a face,” he cried. “Why, it looks as if it had got a crust of salt and sand all over it.”
“So it has, I suppose,” said Chris, rather gruffly, as he began to pat his cheeks softly, rub his eyes, and then deal very tenderly with his cracked lips. “Oh dear, shouldn’t I like a swim, even if it was only in a water-hole that was half mud!”
“But I say, Chris, look here. What about the rattlesnakes? Have we left them all behind?”
“I hope so. There seems to be no sign of any here.”
“And I say, this is quite a different sort of country. Look at the mountains.”