decided to return to our condensers for a fresh supply of water.  Having obtained this, Egan and I revisited our previous prospecting ground, leaving Jim behind to “cook” water against our return; and a more uninteresting occupation I cannot well picture.  Camped alone on a spit of sand, surrounded by a flat expanse of mud, broiled by the sun, half blinded by the glare of the salt, with no shade but a blanket thrown over a rough screen of branches, and nothing to do but to stoke up the fires, change the water in the cooling-trough, and blow off the salt from the bottom of the boilers, he was hardly to be envied.  Yet Jim cheerfully undertook the job and greeted us on our return, after four days, with the smiling remark that his work had been varied by the necessity of plugging up the bottom of one of the boilers which had burned through, with a compound (a patent of his own) formed from strips of his shirt soaked in a stiff paste of flour.  That night we were astonished by the passage of a flight of ducks over our heads, which Egan saw, and I and Conley heard distinctly.

A detailed account of our wanderings would be as wearying to the reader as they were to ourselves, a mere monotonous repetition of cooking water and hunting for “colours” which we never found.  Christmas Eve, 1894, saw us in the vicinity of Mount Monger, where a few men were working on an alluvial patch and getting a little gold.  A lucky storm had filled a deep clay-hole on the flat running north-west from the hills, and here we were at last enabled to give the camels a cheap drink; for over six weeks we had not seen a drop of fresh water beyond what, with infinite labour, we had condensed, with the one exception of the small rock-hole I found at Cowarna.  My entry in my journal for Christmas Day is short and sweet:  “Xmas Day, 1894.  Wash clothes.  Write diary.  Plot course.”  We had no Christmas fare to make our hearts glad and but for the fortunate arrival of my old friend David Wilson, who gave us a couple of packets of cornflour, would have had a scanty feast indeed.

Even in the remote little mining camp Santa Claus did not forget us, and spread his presents, in the form of a deluge of rain, on all alike.  What a pleasant change to get thoroughly wet through!  The storm hardly lasted twenty minutes, but such was its violence that every little creek and watercourse was soon running, and water for weeks to come was secured and plentiful in all directions; but so local is a summer storm that five miles from the camp, no water or signs of rain were to be seen.  Our provisions being finished, nothing remained but to make all speed for Coolgardie, some fifty miles distant by road.  Unencumbered by the condensers, which were abandoned as useless since the bottom of both boilers had burned through, we made fair time, reaching a good camping-ground two miles from the town on the evening of the second day, the 30th of December.

CHAPTER III