After the stories he will have been told, the cyclist, should he be a stranger and alone, will surely throw a glance to one side and to the other—ahead, too, as he turns each of the numerous sharp angles—in half-timid and half-hopeful expectation of seeing start out or up to intercept him a score or two of spear-brandishing and yelling bogie men. And he will almost certainly be disappointed.
* * * *
One who comes upon this mountain wall from the long plains of the south cannot with a single sweep of the eye take in its mightiness. To right and left it holds its course until its purple outlines are bathed in haze, become a mere faint streak, and finally are blotted out. But far behind that gaudily-tinted curtain of sky, which forms the strange horizon of these inlands, this range extends, a steep, austere wall of rock, rising almost perpendicularly from the plain four hundred miles from east to west.
A gap in this mighty wall of rock becomes clearly defined by the time one reaches the bank of a wide creek, with a bed of white sand, which takes its course in the heart of the ranges, and is well known as The Todd. Following up this watercourse for a few miles, the gap through which it comes, the Heavitree, is reached.
The distance through the Heavitree is about 200 yards. The creek's sand-bed spreads right across between the high, bare, sharply-cut mountain sides. The road crosses the Todd at the same time as both pass through the Heavitree Gap; then runs along by its eastern flat bank among the ranges, until three miles onward the buildings at Alice Springs township come into view.
* * * *
A sheltered, peaceful, cosy-looking place, this isolated Alice Springs. On a flat, with large gums scattered through and all around it, and mountains towering up a very little distance off on every side. There are two clusters of houses. One comprises the hotel-cum-brewery, a smithy, and a general store; the other can boast of two stores, a harness-maker's, an often-vacant butcher's shop, and a private dwelling-house. Both clusters are snugly ensconced, hidden among the very numerous gum trees with which the whole flat is dotted; between them some particularly high and shady trees give shelter to the township stock. Cattle are ever to be seen reposefully cud-chewing during the hotter portions of the semi-tropical days.
All shade and silence and tranquility! It seemed as I came upon it to be the veritable "Sleepy Hollow" of romance, with appropriate Catskill-y surroundings, too.
The supplies for Arltunga goldfields, the mica fields, neighboring horse-station and cattle ranches, and the telegraph stations up north, all pass through here.
It is a terminus of townships; beyond it lies the undeveloped.