Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/64

38 together as if they formed a tesselated pavement stretching to the horizon."

The climatic conditions in Central Australia may be described as having a minimum of rainfall with a continuation of high temperature for many months, though in the winter nights the thermometer may fall below freezing-point. But the most important climatic features are long-continued times of drought, when nature is locked up and the native tribes are using all their magical powers to produce the rain which will turn the desert into a veritable garden. Whenever, at long intervals, great inundations are poured down by the rivers, wide plains of dried mud, usually cracked and fissured in all directions, become saturated with water. Then nature, which has been imprisoned by the drought, bursts forth in luxuriant vegetation such as no one can picture who has not seen it.

The following table of observations of the mean annual rainfall taken at places between Lake Eyre and the southern and eastern coasts shows how the rainfall increases as the coast is approached.