The three days' journey to the Dingo Creek Bridge was accomplished without any accident, though the new method of travel and the new country passed through were full of interest to the two boys. Each evening the long line of stately animals was coiled round in a big circle at the camping-place, and the camels were made to kneel down while their loads were unroped and their saddles taken off. Then the black boys who were helping Decker Singh hobbled the camels and drove them off to pick up what food they could find during the night. In the morning the same boys brought them in and made them kneel in the right places to be loaded again for the day.
To have their meals and to sleep near the packs was a novelty which the boys very much enjoyed. The blazing fire with the billies catching the flame, the meal of bread and meat, the hour or two afterwards when they lolled on the sand while Peter smoked and told yarns, and then the cool quiet night with the myriad stars above them; these things made the boys forget the little discomforts they were bound to encounter.
On the second day, towards the middle of the afternoon, a black dot appeared on the horizon, growing bigger and bigger as they approached it. The sun beat down on the bare plains and made the whole landscape quiver with heat, so that things in the distance looked blurred and it was impossible to tell what they were. In this instance the object proved to be a group of date-palms growing round a pool made by a bore-pipe. On all sides of this little oasis stretched the barren desert, and it was quite easy to believe that no man had been able to live in that part of the country before this bore had been put down.
Peter told them that the pipe went straight down into the earth for several thousand feet. Water was struck suddenly. One day, when the men were boring as usual, a noise came up the pipe like sea waves in a blow-hole of rock, a sort of gurgling roar accompanied by a rush of air. Then a column of water, as thick as a man's leg and as strong as a bar of iron, shot up straight into the air and turned over at the top like a gigantic umbrella. The water struck the bore staging with such tremendous force that it smashed a hole clean through a two-inch board as if a shell had crashed into it, and it wrenched the other boards from their supports and flung them for a hundred yards, just a useless mass of splintered wood. The man who was on the platform at the time heard the water coming and jumped for his life. He was not a moment too soon. If he had hesitated, he would have been blown to pieces. The flow is not so strong nowadays, but it still reaches the top of the pipe and flows over, and enables men and cattle to live in a country which used to be a waterless desert.