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.
They spread the blankets against the roots of a great tree, over a bed of heathery scrub, very soft and springy; they had no axe or any means of chopping wood, but there was a thick carpet of dead stuff under the trees. Noticing dead branches hanging by thin strips of bark Marcella made a lasso with the swag straps and pulled them down. As far as warmth went, there was no need for fire at all as soon as the meal was cooked: but out there in the vast purple-blackness of the night with pin-points of starlight in the illimitable loneliness the rose and gold of the spurting flames was comforting and comradely. They piled the dead wood upon it before they lay down; as one resinous branch after another caught fire the trees danced round in giant shadows, as though they were doing a death-dance for their limbs on the funeral pyre. The silence was a complete blank except when a flapping of wings beat the air where some bird changed its night perch, or a parrot squawked hoarsely for a moment, causing a fluttering of smaller wings that soon settled to silence again.