Again: "There is no avoiding the badnesses. The railway line is near at hand. Tried riding alongside the rails—useless, too soft. Between the rails—too rough."
As the wind beat wildly into my face I heard it warningly cry "Go back! Go back!" and in the lulls it droned and muttered chidingly—I knew not why—"Obstinate, foolish fellow." Whereupon, as I wasn't taking any warnings, I stooped, and in a short-lived sprint exerted all the strength I had to bore a hole through the blast.
This sort of thing lasted to Bopuchie, where are some workmen's huts. Here I was treated to bread and butter and tea by a couple of kindly-dispositioned expatriated women, whose husbands were working further up the line. I was also generously presented with a good clean handkerchief, as I had been heard to deeply mourn the recent loss of my own: the wind had whisked it out of my pocket. The same night Diamond and I reached Lake Eyre cottages, where were the husbands and others, a "flying-gang" of navvies on the (some-day-to-be) Transcontinental line. Only 54 miles from Hergott. Heartbreaking work. Yet fed ravenously.
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After leaving Bopuchie, caught myself doing a cautious "Look out for the Train," glancing warily up and down the line. Then I recollected that a train came along only once in three weeks, and was reassured.
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Did you ever, travelling alone, make unexpected acquaintance with a bush grave? The lonely land has been clothed as usual in "weird melancholy." You are weary, and, perhaps, a little dispirited. And then, just behind a mulga tree, you come upon a mound—and it is the length of a man. If you are very weary you will sit upon it, and take off your hat, and think; perhaps in a minute or two shudder a little. Whereupon you will rub your eyes to try and satisfy yourself that you have been foolishly dreaming. But you will not sit again; you will move on, faster than you have been doing.
Between Hergott and Oodnadatta there are several rows of mounds. They are the vouchers for part of the cost of the at present useless railway line. For typhoid and dysentery played sad havoc in the navvies' camps.
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