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At each running stream the packs had to be taken off and carried over. The country traversed was similar to that of yesterday, undulating blood-wood red soil ridges, sufficiently well-grassed, with the everlasting black soil, tea-tree flats, and gullies running between them, some being very wide.
Bartholomew Stibbs met with it on the banks of the Gambia river, and describes it under the name of Par de Sangoe, or blood-wood tree. The gum is a red, inodorous, and insipid resin, soluble in alcohol and oils; and when dissolved by the former, is used for staining marble. Clarke.
Low sandstone hills, broken and split into most extraordinary shapes, forming huge caves and caverns, that once no doubt had been some of the cavernous depths of the ocean, were to be seen in every direction; little runnels, with a few gum-trees upon them, constituted the creeks. Callitris or cypress pines, ornamented the landscape, and a few blood-wood or red gum-trees also enlivened the scene.
The intervening country was one tea-tree level all flooded, but a narrow strip of soft sandy flat occurred on the banks of each, timbered with blood-wood, stringy-bark, and box. Following these down he marked a camp at about nine miles, then crossed over to the river to look for the cattle. He had not followed it far when he saw a mob of blacks.
We made a fire against a log about eighteen inches thick; this was a limb from an adjacent blood-wood or red gum-tree, and this morning we discovered that it had been chopped off its parent stem either with an axe or tomahawk, and carried some forty or fifty yards from where it had originally fallen.
We travelled about eleven miles N. N. W. to lat. 17 degrees 2 minutes 12 seconds, through the bleakest scrubby country we had ever met: nothing but tea-tree scrub, and that not even cheered by the occasional appearance of a gum tree, or of the blood-wood. After ten miles, we came to a salt water creek, rocky, with detached pools of water and deposits of salt.
The country round the base of this range is not devoid of a certain kind of wild beauty. A few blood-wood or red gum-trees, with their brilliant green foliage, enlivened the scene. A small creek, lined with gum-trees, issued from an opening or glen, up which I rode in search of water, but was perfectly unsuccessful, as not a drop of the life-sustaining fluid was to be found.
At their foot a richer tree vegetation existed, principally composed of the leguminous Ironbark, Blood-wood, and Pandanus. The darker verdure of these trees, which we also observed at the foot of the most distant range, made us believe that a river was near it.
It was made of sawn wood and had a high-pitched roof of corrugated zinc, turned to gold by the sunset rays upon it. There was a deep veranda all round the New House, and it was much taller than the wings, being raised on blood-wood piles, that had been tarred to keep off white ants, and with a flight of wooden steps leading up to the veranda.
They were a careless company, concerned rather in "the squandering of life away" than in its preservation. Drink and song, and the firing of guns, and a week's work chipping blood-wood, and then another drunkenness, was the story of their life there. Any "sober men" who came thither were soon "debauched" by "the old Standards," and took to "Wickedness" and "careless Rioting."
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