That day was the strangest experience to them both.  Louis had tramped before in the cooler New Zealand summer; Marcella had walked miles on Lashnagar.  But this walking through the dry, sun-scorched scrub, on which their feet slipped and slid was an experience quite unique.  The heat rose from the ground to meet that blazing down from the sky of Prussian blue.  At eight o’clock they were both tired, but Marcella, who plodded on, calm and unworried, was not nearly so tired as Louis who made himself hot and dissipated much energy in wondering when they would get there—­wherever “there” might be.  He had started the day whistling and gay; by ten o’clock he was in the depths of despair and took Marcella’s attempts to chaff him as insults and injuries.  As soon as they reached a patch of stunted bushes she decreed a halt and a rest.  They filled the billy from their water-bottles and, making a fire with the scorched scrub, had it boiling in a few moments.  Louis, though he was revived to interest by the pannikin of tea and a cigarette and biscuits, sank back into deep depression after a few minutes, saying that their coming into the Bush had been the act of lunatics, that they would die of starvation and thirst—­until she made him take out his map and find out where they were.

Together they pored over it.  After much wrangling they located Loose End beside a small lake and decided that they would reach there to-morrow with considerable effort.

“Anyway, we’ll have to, because of our water,” said Louis.  “Otherwise we’ll die.”  But Marcella found that, by going a few miles west, they would catch up the creek that drained into the little lake.

“It’ll only be a dried water-course,” said Louis miserably.

“No it won’t.  It’s sure to be a foaming torrent if I say it shall.  Didn’t you know I was a witch?” she told him, and she was certainly more right than he, for that night they camped under great eucalyptus trees beside a water-course which ran deep and still at their feet.  The first thing they did was to gather wood and make a great fire.  After the day’s anxiety about water it was intoxicating to know that unlimited quantities were to be dipped up and made into tea.  While the water boiled they splashed about in the water, shaking sand out of the folds of their underclothes and their hair.

They had brought eggs and flour and salt.  Louis, looking pleased with himself, produced a tin of Eno’s Fruit Salt.

“Always take this stuff into the Bush,” he explained.  “If you can only get muddy water, this makes it more possible.  And it’s dashed good stuff for making damper less damping.”

He put in too much and the damper was so light that it crumbled and got mixed up in the wood ashes.  But they were both too hungry to notice whether they were eating damper or wood ash, and much too blissful to care.