It took even Geordie some time to get to the top, for the cliff was higher than it appeared to be from the ravine, but at last he was able to grasp the stout stem of a ti-bush that grew on the edge of the crag, and holding this and throwing his chest on to the flat ground at the top he was able to haul himself up. He sprang to his feet at once, for he was in such perfect condition that even the violent exertion he had just made had not put him out of breath. He found himself on a little piece of comparatively level ground which rose, at first gradually, and then by a steeper incline, till it joined the great bulk of Tooingoora, which towered, majestic and grim, before him. The ground, just where he was, was covered with a thick and tangled growth of scrub, through which he could hear the sound of the swiftly running stream, which poured itself with a roar over the edge of the height.
George made his way between the bushes with some little difficulty, for they were so matted together with a strong wiry sort of creeper, and in a moment or two he reached the edge of the stream. He found that it was flowing very rapidly, as though preparing for the leap it was about to make, along a rocky watercourse, which at present was a great deal too wide for its requirements, but the whole of which in flood times it would probably occupy.
George examined the bed of the stream very carefully, walking up it some little way and then back again to the place where the water plunged over the edge of the rock in one great smooth sweep. He seemed to observe one part more than any; it was where a dried-up arm of the watercourse branched out from the side of the running stream; it would evidently be converted into a stream itself if only a very little more water came down from the mountain, for its sandy bed was only just above the level of the one that was then flowing. After examining the nature of the ground just there, George gave a little satisfied laugh, and said, in a deeply mysterious manner--
By the way he poked about among the loose rocks and stones, and scratched in the sand with a short stick he had cut in the scrub, it looked as though he were doing a little prospecting for gold on his own account. But the thought that there was gold above the fall as well as below it had not entered his head. Had he been a practical gold digger he would have recognised at once, from the nature of the stones about him, that he was amongst the gold-bearing rocks, or rather that the stones were fragments, brought down from the mountain, of auriferous quartz.