110 THE SPENCER GULF DISTRICT 



safest course — to dig or search. Very little time need be 

 lost in digging. At least one experienced bushman should 

 accompany every band of explorers, and an experienced 

 man will be able to tell with an hour's digging if water lies 

 near enough to be reached with the spade. If it is argued 

 that digging must be, to some extent, chance work : the 

 reply is, that searching for water in Australia is certainly 

 chance work. Hundreds of dead have been found, empty 

 billy in hand, who evidently spent their last minutes in a 

 wild rush from gully to gully in search of a few drops of 

 the precious fluid which would have meant life to the poor 

 unfortunate ; and I have seen it proved that abundance of 

 water was lying three of four feet beneath some of the 

 corpses. 



However, I found water everywhere in the Torrens 

 district ; often bad, it is true, but always drinkable. In the 

 summer time it is probably more difficult to find. In 

 many places at the foot of the Flinder's range it lies not 

 six feet beneath the surface, and there it is of very good 

 quality. There are also some water-holes in this range 

 which are probably never quite dry. 



Some of these mountains are pitted in a very singular 

 manner with a number of small round holes, similar to 

 those which are called by geologists " pot-holes," but they 

 could not here have been formed by the action of running 

 water on rounded boulders. They seem rather to be the 

 result of a peculiar form of weathering or disintegra- 

 tion of the rock. They are so numerous on some of the 

 mountains that the rock might almost be described as 

 being honeycombed with them. The holes are nine or 

 ten feet deep generally, and about the same across, being 

 pretty symmetrical in shape. Some are more than twenty 

 feet deep, and after rain are full of water. Possibly the 

 larger ones have water in them all the year round. In one 

 we found a drowned wallaby, which had been dead some 

 time, having probably accidentally leaped in and been 

 unable to get out again. 



The plain country at the foot of the range is a succes- 

 sion of low sand ridges which are thickly covered with a 



