Page:Outlawandlawmak00praegoog.djvu/304

292 stones peculiar to the district. The loneliness was intense. The men had set the camp on a little clear plateau, on one of the mountain spurs, with a ravine on each side, from which came the sound of a torrent rushing over stones. This torrent was one of the heads of the Luya river, forming in places a wide rocky bed bordered with dense scrub. All round, except from whence they had come, rose thick black scrub, up to where the mountains rose sheer—both Luya and Burrum being somewhat of the same conformation, their peaks girdled with ribbed precipices. But Mount Luya had this peculiarity, that the summit was flat—indeed the flatness seemed a depression, and was in truth the hollow of an extinct crater, now a lake. A lower peak, evidently also a dead volcano, stood out from the higher one like a huge flat-topped excrescence, completely surrounded, except where it joined the mountain, by a perfectly bare wall of rock and absolutely inaccessible. The pines grew up to this wall, but there were none above it—only the desolate grandeur of the naked rock. Beyond this projecting platform, as it seemed, the precipice shelved into the heart of the mountain, with the river running below it and another inaccessible wall of rock upon the other side narrowing into a V, so that the cleft had the appearance of a slice cut bodily from the mountain, and the hollow was black, with what appeared to be impenetrable scrub. Here was the Baròlin Fall, and some of the party fancied that they could hear in the distance the thunder of the waters.

A few white gums, with peeling bark and long withes of grey moss, had a spectral look against the pyramidal blackness of the bunyas and the spinnifex jungle. The camp fires looked cheerful in the gloom of this shut-in region, though the summits of Burrum and Luya were golden in the setting sun. Great boulders of rock strewed the little treeless place. Some rose like misshapen monoliths to a considerable height, some were piled as though by design one upon another, and smaller stones lay pell mell, grass and ferns growing between them. On the slope of the pinch were a few twisted grass trees, and Frank Hallett,