“ON THE ROCKY WALL A RED HAND.”
“Don’t they look queer, Donald?” said Harry; “just as if they were murderers and people getting murdered poking their hands out of the stone. I wonder who did them, and what they mean.”
“Why, the black fellows don’t know,” answered Donald. “They say the old people did them, but they don’t know who the old people were. I expect a flood drowned them. Do you know the story the black fellows tell about the Flood? They say that somewhere or other in Australia the black fellows’ father lies asleep on the ground, with his head resting on his arm; and that he woke up ever so long ago, and that then all the country was flooded; and that when he wakes next, he will eat up all the black fellows. They say he is a giant—taller than that blue gum on the ridge. The old fellow puts them into a great funk. Up at our place I went out one day with a black fellow after honey. He caught a native bee, and stuck a bit of down on it, and chased it till it lighted on a tree, and then he climbed up with his tomahawk, and tapped till he found where the nest was. He cut out the combs and the bee-bread before you could say ‘Jack Robinson;’ but he took precious care to leave some of the honey for the old giant. If he’s asleep, though, I don’t see what good it would do him.”
“They’re a queer lot, the black fellows,” philosophically remarked Harry; “but they’re a long sight better than new chums—they were born in the colony just like us. A black fellow can ride like a native, but those Englishmen look so scared when a horse begins to buck.”
Just then, however, it was Harry’s turn to look scared, for a great grey owl, with round eyes that gleamed like polished guineas, brushed against his face, and directly afterwards two or three flying foxes floated by, looking in the dark very much like dirty cherubim off a tombstone.
Donald laughed to see how the owl and the great bats made Harry jump, when he had been talking so big the minute before. Presently they walked into a cloud of great dusky moths that came fluttering about the lantern like butterflies’ ghosts, and then they saw stalactites hanging down like sheets and chandeliers, and fruit and flowers, and plucked geese, and organ-pipes, and joining on to the stalagmites on the floor, and making columns and cloisters and great hour-glasses. Some of the stalactites rang in tune when they rapped them, like harmonicons. It would have been a very jolly place to wander about in, if the water had not dropped off the roof down the napes of their necks, and if they had not been obliged to look out so sharp to keep from tumbling down little precipices, or into the streams they could hear running, and the ponds they could sometimes see shining through the darkness.
They had scrambled down three or four of the little precipices (the cave’s floor was like a great rough flight of stairs) when they stopped to look at a pillar that was just like a huge candle with a “winding-sheet.”
“Why, there’s a red hand up there,” said Harry, pointing to the winding-sheet.
Donald could not see it, and so Harry put the lantern on to the end of a long stick he carried, and held it up to what he said was the hand. But still Donald could not see one.