Shouldering the bicycle I walked cautiously to where the pad showed still a narrow streak, yet offering a clear, narrow running space. As I walked—I speak without exaggeration—I now and again heard sweat drops, hiss and fizzle, as they fell on a burning log or some little grass-root heap.
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For five miles at a stretch this fresh-burnt ground continued. Tress stood out like torches all the way; and on the pad were many live coals of fallen timber. I dare not hurry, and often had to dismount and lift the bicycle over, because if my tyres blazed up I hadn't water to spare with which to put the Ixionic fire out. Nevertheless I did that five miles scorching.
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Out of the fire and into a frying-pan of hot sand ten miles long and unridable. Towards the end of the ten miles so many large boulders and long flat slabs of granite cropped up in the track that there was a danger of getting dizzy from rounding them; and these senseless outcroppings at the last became so numerous that a bye-track made a seven mile detour towards the Katherine. At that beautiful river I arrived, after a hard days "graft" at sundown. 214 miles from Palmerston.
A hotel at last. Those "terrors" of the Overland which were to bring certain destruction had been left behind.
The buildings consist of the hotel and store, telegraph and police stations. They are on the south side of the river, which to the westward joins the Daly.
The sloping banks of the Katherine rise 80 or more feet from the gravelly bed, and are thickly timbered with giant trees of many varieties. Here and in the country round about are, as well as thickets, jungles and beauty spots innumerable, the stately paperbark and Leichhardt pine, Pandanus palms, white cedar, woollybutt, bloodwood, ironwood, banyan, and other trees; and splendid couch and buffalo grasses.
When in flood the stream is about a quarter of a mile wide. Boats are kept at both the hotel and the telegraph station. Alligators are known to exist in several places, in deep holes and long reaches, but only a small species of crocodile is often seen about the crossing place. A fine specimen of one of these latter was on view at the hotel.
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