e never known anything
different!

I could enumerate a score of strange tricks that our friend exhibited.
What surprised me most was to see him make use, in unmistakable
pantomime, of a vulgar expression that I thought was only known to
English schoolboys!

Between the Forebank Hills and the tablelands we were now approaching is
an open plain of spinifex some ten miles wide, bounded on North and South
by sand-ridges. From these in the morning the long line of broken
tablelands could be seen ahead of us, and running for a considerable
distance to the eastward. The highest point of those more immediately to
our front I named Mount Fothringham, after my cousin. The headland for
which we were steering was too far off to be reached that night, so we
camped on a ridge, and during the night noticed a small fire in the hills
ahead. It could only be a camp-fire of some natives, so, noting its
direction, and being unable to see anything further, we retired to rest.

The next morning, with the help of the glasses, we could see several
black figures moving about on the sloping foot of the cliffs, and
therefore steered in their direction. Our mad friend had to be
accommodated on the top of a camel, as he refused to walk or move, and I
wished to leave him with friends, or at any rate with fellow-countrymen,
though we no longer required his services as guide, in which
capacity he had been singularly useless. Five miles brought us to the
hills, and close on to the natives' camp whose fire we had seen, before
they discovered us; when they did so they fled, seven or eight of them,
and hid in caves in the sandstone. We had now been only four days since
the last water, but the weather was so hot, feed so scarce, and so much
ground burnt and dusty, that it was time we gave the camels another drink
if we wished to keep them in any sort of condition. From the native camp
a few tracks led round a corner of rock; these I followed, with the
camels coming behind, and soon saw two small native wells sunk in the
sand and debris, held in a cleft in the rock. Nothing but bare rock rose
all round, and on this we made camp, turning the camels out at the foot
of the cliffs where a few bushes grew.

Godfrey and Warri meanwhile had followed the blacks into the caves, and
now returned with two of the finest men I have seen in the interior. One,
a boy, apparently about eighteen years old, splendidly formed and
strongly built, standing nearly six feet hi