The surrounding country is bleak and desolate—dreary in the extreme. The average annual rainfall is about 7in. per annum.
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If one is not on the look-out, these mounds, in general appearance so much alike, are apt to tantalise one. For my own part, moralising upon nature's marvellous scheme of compensation, I found myself adrift. Yet, pshaw! Bushed so soon—and a rail-track within three miles at most? It was monstrous. Refused to consult my compass; and paid for my folly by some few hours of hard labor.
A boggy little lake of salt water, its supply kept constant by one of the mound springs, first intruded itself; and on rounding its northern end I was amongst sandy undulations past which I could not see. Then a wide but not gum-lined creek, the nearer bank low, and one point occupied by half-a-dozen blacks' wurlies, like so many boats on end. The further bank was high and steep; and climbing over this I marked a course, which I judged would be due east, towards some bush-like objects in the distance. But these objects proved to be a small mob of wild-mannered cattle, which soon, racing towards me, pranced gaily around with uplifted tails. It is not fair to ask a man to persist in a due east course in such circumstances.
I grew fretful; looked at the time, the sun, and the shadows, but could only make a guess at the east. The guess, however, happened to be correct, and by evening I was in Coward, a township which consists chiefly of a public-house and—an anomaly indeed!—an interesting bore.
The bore at the Coward is situated in the heart of the little township, between the railway fences. The water wells up to the height of a dozen or more feet above the surface, and, wide-spreading over the end of a six-inch conducting pipe, feeds a tiny sparkling rivulet. This stream runs for several chains, and finally gives back the water to the desert ground.
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All these artesian waters are drinkable, but more or less brackish. There, as at most of the other bores, blind fish come up out of the artesian reservoirs—fish beyond a doubt, two or three inches long, but exhibiting not even rudimentary eyes.
This total absence of eyes is a curious fact in natural history; in the great dark caves of America the crayfish have eyes, though they are sightless. So also elsewhere. But "eyes would be no use to them in the blackness down under," the local cicerone says. Yet wherefore? Should they not rather be provided with unusually good eyes?
(Happy thought: when all else fails I will come hither and inaugurate the great Centralian Sardine industry.)