In my mind, now, was the fixed idea that nothing could break that machine. I knew I couldn't. And it had been called on to undergo some rough usage. Towards the end, such confidence had I come to repose in its excellence, in its unbreakableness, that on hearing sticks and things rattle among the spokes I used only to laugh, say "Sool it, Diamond!" and let them fight the battle out.
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The hilly country alternates with stretches of sand, blue-grass, swamps, and rough patches of white clay or pug, with here and there a stunted gum. I find at this stage this memorandum written for myself—"Horrid, swampy, inexpressibly bleak and unattractive, miserably stunted timber—a result, p'raps, of centuries of bush fires. A 68 mile-span unfit for anything—except those strips close by the creeks and watercourses." These latter were the redeeming features. The water in some was deep, notably in the Driffield, Fergusson, Edith and Cullen Creeks, which are rivers for a month or two in the rainy season.
In one of them—the Edith, I think—a little way down from one, nearly waist-deep crossing, was an inviting reach of calm, deep water, with many picturesque pandanus palms and woolly butts caressing it; and as a family of aboriginals—two old men, many picaninnies and some females—were bathing by the roadway. To this I wheeled the bicycle.
The bottom was gravelly, and in the deepest place there was only four feet or so of water. The stream, or rather hole, was narrow; and while paddling about in it the thought struck me that it would be just as well to cross now and here as to cross at any other time and place. And, besides, an opportunity for experimenting presented itself.
To bundle up the clothes and the few odds and ends I had with me was the work of but a couple of minutes; those things I was able to walk across with. On returning I laid the bicycle on its side close by the water's edge, made fast the interlocking gear, and fastened securely to its handlebars one end of the strong string I always had carried. To the free end of the string I attached a stone. This I threw to the opposite bank and swam over after it.
I would have swam that stream though my knees had got the gravelrash in the transaction!
Laying hold now of the string I pulled gently on the bicycle until it moved; then pulled it quickly whilst in the water; and so landed it where I was standing. Undoing the string I allowed my silently weeping comrade to remain out in the sun, where its doleful tears quick turned into smiling rainbows while I resumed my clothes. Then gave it five minutes attention.
This wetting, I might here remark, did no more harm to the bicycle than a smart shower of rain would have done, but at Palmerston, where I totally immersed it in the sea, I found the salt water quickly formed rust on the various nickeled parts around the nuts and where the spokes entered the rim and perhaps within the tubes themselves for aught I know, as there, alas! monetary considerations forced me to part with it.
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