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On resuming, after the welcome interval at Alice Springs, a 14-mile cycle walk through the MacDonnell ranges was the first act billed on the day's programme.
The track winds its toilsome way over the lowest rises and through gullies squeezed between the higher of the rough granite and sandstone hills. Much bigger ones—each duly catalogued and named by somebody at sometime, I have no doubt—loomed up in every direction. Many of the gullies are well grassed. Saltbush and mulga are met with occasionally; and everywhere spring up low bushes of the kinds that are fattening and well-beloved of flocks and herds. Rideable stretches of a mile or so may be passed over as hardly worth noticing.
The hills end rather abruptly; and a thickly timbered plain outstretches itself, extending as far eye can reach. Riding on to it one finds everywhere abundance of grass as well as salt and blue bush. There are some open places, but for the greater part of the way to Burt Well (21 miles from the range) the traveller advances within avenues cut through densely-packed and far-extending mulga scrub.
The riding is very fair—a light loamy soil—but a sharp look-out has to be kept for stumps on the roughly-cleared chain-wide track along the telegraph line.
Innumerable small spire-like formations and mounds, the hills of white ants, dot the track, and cumber its sides. None, curiously enough, are known to exist south of the MacDonnell ranges.
Yet what impressed me most during the day's ride was that instead of having entered a desert, I was pursuing a course through country of the best description for stock—only lacking in water.
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Arriving at a lovely waterhole overhung with gum trees on the Burt Creek (a pad branching from the main track leads to it), I stopped to have a bath and enjoy the cool of the heavy shadow.
It is a law of the overland that a waterhole, unless it be very large or there be others close by, must not be used for soapy-washing. One dips up water with a billycan or pannikin, and, stepping back, should he not have a wash-dish, he washes with one hand. It isn't satisfying, but it has to do.