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Near Michelup are lakelets worth noticing; a little under Sterbohol, in the course of this miserable Brook, is a string of fish-ponds, with their sluices open at this time, the water out, and the mud bottom sown with herb-provender for the intended carps, which is coming on beautifully, green as leeks, and nearly ready for the fish getting to it again.
There were no trees, no bushes, nothing but a gray sea of moss scarcely diversified by gray rocks, gray lakelets, and gray streamlets. The sky was gray. There was no sun nor hint of sun. He had no idea of north, and he had forgotten the way he had come to this spot the night before. But he was not lost. He knew that. Soon he would come to the land of the little sticks.
Captain Vane gazed up at it as Napoleon the First may be supposed to have gazed at the Alps he had resolved to scale and cross. The resemblance to alpine scenery was not confined to mere form such as towering peaks and mighty precipices for there were lakelets and ponds here and there up among the crystal heights, from which rivulets trickled, streams brawled, and cataracts thundered.
Sink holes are common, and many of them are occupied by lakelets. Great springs mark the point of issue of underground streams, while some rise from beneath the sea. Silver Spring, one of the largest, discharges from a basin eight hundred feet wide and thirty feet deep a little river navigable for small steamers to its source. About the spring there are no surface streams for sixty miles.
The wind of the morning waking, rippled on the lakelets, and blew the bracken softly northward. The heather was dark rose purple, the "ling" dominating the miles of moor; for the lavender-grey flush of the true heather had not yet broken over the great spaces of the south uplands. So their feet dragged slower as they drew near to that spot where they knew they must part.
On the level and hotter pampas this appearance is intensified, and the faintly visible wavering flames change to an appearance of lakelets or sheets of water looking as if ruffled by the wind and shining like molten silver in the sun.
Yet another interesting group of fresh-water lakes, or rather we should call them lakelets from their small size, owes its origin to the curious underground excavations or caverns which are formed in limestone countries.
There was a saffron hue over the eastern landscape that caused it to appear like the plains of Paradise. Lakelets in the prairies glittered in the midst of verdant foliage; ponds in the hollows lay, as yet unillumined, like blots of ink; streams and rivulets gleamed as they flowed round wooded knolls, or sparkled silvery white as they leaped over rocky obstructions.
In some places, according to the run of the currents, the land has risen into marshy islets, consolidated, some by art, and some by time, into ground firm enough to be built upon or fruitful enough to be cultivated: in others, on the contrary, it has not reached the sea-level; so that, at the average low water, shallow lakelets glitter among its irregularly exposed fields of seaweed.
One beautiful evening we encamped on the margin of one of those innumerable lakelets which gleam like diamonds on the breast of the great wilderness, through which for many weeks we had been voyaging.
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