As we watched, horribly fascinated, Dan indulged in a soliloquy—­a habit with him when ordinary conversation seemed out of place. “’Awful dry Wet we’re having,’ sez he,” he murmured, “’the place is alive with dead cattle.’  ‘Fact,’ sez he, ’cattle’s dying this year that never died before.’” Then remarking that “this sort of thing” wasn’t “exactly a thirst quencher,” he followed up the creek bank into a forest of cabbage-tree palms—­tall, feathery-crested palms everywhere, taller even that the forest trees; but never a sign of water.

It was then two o’clock, and our last drink had been at breakfast—­soon after sun-up; and for another hour we pegged wearily on, with that seven hours’ drouth done horses, the beating sun of a Territory October overhead, Brown stretched across the Maluka’s knees on the verge of apoplexy, and Sool’em panting wearily on.  With the breaking of her leg little Tiddle’ums had ended her bush days, but as she lost in bush craft she gained in excellency as a fence personifier.

By three o’clock we struck water in the Punch Bowl—­a deep, volcanic hole, bottomless, the blacks say, but apparently fed beneath by the river; but long before then Dan’s chuckle had died out, and soliloquies had ceased to amuse him.

At the first sight of the water we revived, and as Brown and Sool’em lay down and revelled on its margin, Dan “took a pull as an introduction,” and then, after unpacking the team and getting the fire going for the billy, he opened out the tucker-bags, having decided on a “fizz” as a “good quencher.”

“Nothing like a fizz when you’ve got a drouth on,” he said, mixing soda and cream-of-tartar into a cup of water, and drinking deeply.  As he drank, the “fizz” spattered its foam all over his face and beard, and after putting down the empty cup with a satisfied sigh, he joined us as we sat on the pebbly incline, waiting for the billy to boil, and with the tucker-bags dumped down around and about us.  “Real refreshing that!” he said, drawing a red handkerchief from his belt and mopping his spattered face and beard, adding, as he passed the damp handkerchief over his ears and neck with chuckling exaggeration:  “Tell you what!  A fizz ’ud be a great thing if you were short of water.  You could get a drink and have a good wash-up with the one cupful.”

With the “fizz,” Dan’s interest in education revived, and after dinner he took up the role of showman of the Roper scenery once more, and had us scrambling over boulders and cliffs along the dry bed of the creek that runs back from the Punch Bowl, until, having clambered over its left bank into a shady glen, we found ourselves beneath the gem of the Roper—­a wide-spreading banyan tree, with its propped-up branches turning and twisting in long winding leafy passages and balconies, over a feathery grove of young palm trees that had crept into its generous shade.