Men's voices were also heard, as we proceeded quietly to our old ground, and I could not help regretting that after having given the natives on the Gwydir the slip, and seen no others the whole day, we should again find the very spot on which we were to pass the night, pre-occupied by natives. Our party set up their tents, and the song ceased, but I proceeded with Mr. White towards the place whence the voices came. We there saw several persons amid smoke, and apparently regardless of our presence; indeed, their apathy, as compared with the active vigilance of the natives in general, was surprising. A young man continued to beat out a skin against a tree without caring to look at us, and as they made no advance we did not go up to them. Mr. White, on visiting their fires however at ten P.M. found that they had decamped.
All this seemed rather mysterious until the nature of the song I had heard was explained to me afterwards at Sydney by The Bushranger when I visited him in the hulk on my return. He then imitated the notes, and informed me that they were sung by females when mourning for the dead; and he added that on such occasions it was usual for the relatives of the deceased to seem inattentive or insensible to whatever people might be doing around them.*
(*Footnote. This custom is not peculiar to Australia, it prevailed also in the East:
"A melancholy choir attend around,
With plaintive sighs, and music's solemn sound:
Alternately they sing, alternate flow
The obedient tears, melodious in their woe." Pope's Iliad, Book 24 verse 900.The note here is: "This was a custom generally received, and which passed from the Hebrews to the Greeks, Romans, and Asiatics. There were weepers by profession, of both sexes, who sung doleful tunes round the dead." Harmer Volume 3 page 31.
It is admitted by all that this last practice obtained, and the following passages are proofs of it. Jeremiah 9:17, 18. "Call for the mourning women that they may come, and let them make haste, and take up a wailing for us, that our eyes may run down with tears, and our eyelids gush out with waters." Idem. pages 33 to 36.)
At the time however this behaviour of the natives only made us more on our guard, and impressed the men with a sense of the necessity for vigilance, especially during the night when a watch was set on the cattle, and two men guarded the camp, while all the rest slept with their arms at hand.
This day two of the dogs fell behind, and as the whole were miserably poor we at first supposed that these had died from exhaustion; but as the weaker of the two came up to us in the evening it appeared then more probable that the dogs had been detained by the natives, who might be following our track, and that this one had escaped from them.
DOG KILLED BY A SNAKE.
February 11.
On the march this morning we lost an excellent little watch-dog, named Captain, by the bite of a snake. While the other dogs with the party grew mere skeletons, Captain continued in good case, having fared very well on the rats, mice, bandicoots, etc. which he, under the direction of The Doctor, who shared the prey, had the sagacity to scrape out of the earth. Captain was also a formidable enemy to lizards, et hoc genus omne; but this morning his owner found him engaged with that venomous reptile known in the colony by the name of deaf-adder, and although compelled instantly to let it go, it was too late, for poor Captain stretched out his legs and expired on the spot, having been already bitten by the poisonous reptile.
BIRDS NESTS.
We repassed this day the place where only I had seen that bush of the interior, the Stenochilus maculatus. It grew to the height of about four or five feet, and we found the fruit and flower on the same twig. Numerous small birds with red bills flew about these bushes, and we found, slightly attached to the tender top-twigs, their tiny nests in great numbers, some containing eggs. No instinctive sagacity, such as we perceive in birds elsewhere, to conceal their nests, was here apparent, nor was it required; but such nests must have fallen an easy prize even to very little boys, had there been any; so that the security these birds enjoyed seemed truly characteristic of the desert and absence of birds of prey.