And suppose I did get to a telegraph or other station. Is it a couple of riding and pack horses, with saddles, packs, and provisions all on, and a black boy, you would throw at the head of a stranger cyclist who had been warned against coming your way, yet who arrives—only to break down at your door?
I would be a nuisance to myself and everyone else around the place I reached, and to all who had associated their names in any way with mine. Ugh? The situation would be unbearably horrible. And the prospect! When the time came, and I was given the chance to go north or south, what a prospect loomed either way before me!
If the bike broke down, I would have made but very little exertion indeed to get out into the world at either end. Why should I, even if an opportunity of doing so soon presented itself—out into where the crooked finger of derisive "I told him so" would evermore be mockingly bent towards me? Why should I, when I could lie down and remain, quite comfortably, and in peace, at the side of the first waterhole I should come upon!
When a fellow gets into the habit of lying awake o' nights out in the open, gazing upwards at the starlit sky, and thinking dreamily of what lies beyond, he is—at least some of him are—liable to become more or less desirous of satisfying the curiosity such ruminations excites. The stars twinkle as if they were all quite happy. If one could only be quite sure.—But I'd rather chance that than face the other certainty. I would cut no telegraph wire; would trouble no station people or anyone else. And so I comforted myself, and slept well.
* * * *
On leaving Frew's beautiful pond early in the morning, the road leading to Daly Waters (55 miles) was assured by the Chinamen's tracks. Remarkable tracks these—left by flat oblong pieces of wood with which each traveller was sandal-shod.
The road from the pond, still strewn with ironstone-gravel, immediately entered the forest, where of the sky little was to be seen except a narrow strip overhead. A short strip this, too, for the road wound now to the west, now away to the east, or, again, ran northwards.
And so light-heartedly I wheeled through the morning's shadows, between two walls of forest trees, and over or around logs and branches of fallen ones, for 17 miles. Then came three miles of dangerous "Bay of Biscay" ground; then five miles of still treacherous track, on which were many patches of "Biscay holes" and lengths of fallen timber; and then again the jungle, and so to Daly Waters.
Besides the higher trees, a heavy undergrowth, and many kinds of grass flanked either side. The trees were in great variety—bloodwood, ironwood, lancewood, coolabah, bauhinia, hedgewood, whipcord tree and quinine tree. Added to these, a bush known as the water wattle, a native orange, and a turpentine bush; and, for aught I know, a dozen others.