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Occupied an hour as I rode along working out the (? musical) note educed by a tyre flicking aside loose stones. Found it to be high D. ("Pung" in cycling notation.)
When the stone is not flicked aside, but the machine passes over it, a low D is emitted—by the rider.
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Road middling to the Blanche Cup and cluster of mound springs. These remarkable features lie about two miles off the main track, to the left. I cycled over—not cutting across at right angles, but gradually edging away from the track on sighting them.
There are eight or ten of the cone-shaped, flat-topped rises, all within a radius of half a mile. Roughly, I should say their average vertical height is twenty feet. The summits of most of them are merely small swamps decorated with rushes and bogged cattle in various stages of decomposition. Little driblets of water trickle down the sides.
Two of them are well worth journeying far to see.
The Blanche itself is an elevated circular pond of good drinkable water. On one side a lip has been worn through the impounding rock, and by this passage the cup gently overflows. The water so escaping streams down the sloping side, and forms into a shallow swampy creek.
The other is locally known as the Boiling Spring. Flowing much stronger than the Blanche, it boils or bubbles at the centre, not from heat, but because of the force with which the water is driven to the surface. The temperature of the water is about 100° Fahrenheit. A circle of sedimentary sand, three feet in diameter, is kept in constant motion around the bubbling centre, and around this again spreads a wide circle of perfectly clear water. Rushes fringe the water's edge, and the whole is surrounded by a rim of whitish rock three feet wide. About once in every half-hour the quickly settling sand so accumulates at the centre as to choke back the ascending stream. Then to the observer a big thing in bubbles heaves in sight; a low rumble is heard; a periodical clearance has been effected, and the boiling spring boils bubblingly as before.