Whilst on the subject of industries, I may mention that of obtaining solder from meat-tins by piling them into large heaps and lighting a fire over them.  The melted lumps of solder thus formed were collected by the ordinary process of dry-blowing, and sold to tinsmiths and others engaged in the manufacture of condensers.  Certainly the scarcity of water was not an unmixed curse, for it gave employment to many who would otherwise have been hard put to it to gain a living.  Dam-makers, well-sinkers, water-carters, tinsmiths, condenser-fitters, wood-cutters, employees on condensing plants, water-bag makers, caretakers at Government wells, dams, and soaks, engineers, and many more, all found employment either directly or indirectly in connection with water supply.

By sinking in the bed of dry clay-pans water can usually be obtained, but unfortunately it is almost sure to be salt.  The difference between clay-pans before and after rain is most marked.  First we have the dry, hard bed of red clay, blistered and cracked into all manner of patterns by the sun’s heat; around us the stillness of death, nothing astir unless it be the constant shimmering haze of heat which strikes our faces like the blast from a furnace.  Rain falls, and within a few hours the air will be filled with the croaking of frogs and the cackling of ducks.* To my mind it is one of the most incomprehensible things in Nature that wildfowl (for not only ducks, but sometimes swans and geese are seen) know when and where rain has fallen.

[* Sir John Forrest, in his exploration of 1874, found ducks, geese, and swans on Lake Augusta—­a salt lake in the arid interior, five hundred miles from the coast.]

But, stranger still, how do they know it is going to fall?  That they would seem to do so the following will go to show.  Whilst we were condensing on Lake Lapage, one moonlight night we saw a flight of ducks fly over us to the northward.  No surface water then existed anywhere near us.  This was on December 16th.  No rain fell in the district until December 25th, but I ascertained afterwards that rain fell at Lake Carey, one hundred miles north of Lake Lapage about the same date that we had seen the ducks.  The exact date I am not sure of, but in any case the ducks either foresaw the rain or knew that rain had fallen at least two hundred miles away; for they must have come from water (and at that season there was no surface water within one hundred miles of us) and probably from the coast.  In either case, I think it is an extremely interesting fact, and however they arrive the ducks are a welcome addition to the prospector’s “tucker-bags.”

CHAPTER IV

A CAMEL FIGHT

Leaving Hannan’s on our left, we continued our northerly course, over flat country timbered with the usual gum-forest, until we reached the auriferous country in which our camp had been robbed by the blacks; nothing of interest occurring until January 17th, when we found ourselves without water.  Knowing that we must soon strike the road from Broad Arrow to Mount Margaret, this gave us no anxiety, and, beyond the necessity of travelling without having had a drink for eighteen hours, but little discomfort.