Page:More Australian legendary tales.djvu/79

 am thirsty. I must go back to the water-holes I passed and get a drink there."

Before going, he looked as far as his eye could reach across the sea. He said: "What sort of flood water is this that has a tree in it nowhere, not even a mirrieh-bush, and is salt, salt to taste? It does not look like flood water at all. It looks like Goonagulla, the sky, with white clouds on it. Yet when the clouds move the sky is still; all this moves and is water, though surely man never tasted such before."

Wonderingly, back he went to the water-holes and quenched his thirst. Then he killed two opossums, and skinned them to make water-bags, or gulleemeah.

That night as he camped out of sight of, and some distance away from, the sea he heard its booming noise, for the wind had risen. What the noise was he did not know.

The next morning he went to see the strange water again, thinking he might now make out a bank on the far side. Seeing a high tree a few hundred yards from the beach, he climbed up it and looked again seawards, scanning the distant horizon for trees or land. He saw only water, a dark troubled-looking water that day.

"There is a thunderstorm in it. This must be the camp of Dooloomai the Thunder, and the roaring winds," he said as he listened to the angry booming, "That is what I heard last night." Then, as he saw the tide rising and the waves chasing each other on to the beach, where they dashed with an angry roar, going back only to come rushing in again higher next time, he said: "There must be Wundah—devils—in it, and they are trying to get me.