Then on again, through the gate into the great Emu Lake paddock, a fenced area eighteen miles square. The stock having been excluded for two years, the grasses lay beneath the sun like turned oats. Patches of healthy scrub encumbered the undulating grasslands like dark, rocky islands. Here in this paddock sheltered for two years, the kangaroos were numerous; and, on nearing a bore-head, the travellers were greeted by a vast flock of galah parrots.

Every twenty-four hours seven hundred thousand gallons of water hotly gushed from the bore-head to run away for miles along the channel scooped to carry it. Years before, when the bore first had been sunk to tap the artesian reservoir, the flow was nearly eleven hundred thousand gallons every twenty-four hours.

Day and night, year in and year out, the stream spouted hot from the iron casing to run down the channel now edged with the snow-white soda suds. Not within half a mile of the bore could cattle drink the water, so hot and so loaded withalkalies was it.

Nettlefold drove the car beside the channel for some distance before turning to the north along an old and faint track. About ten minutes after leaving the bore stream they emerged from dense scrub and were on the dry, perfectly flat bottom of a shallow ground depression from which the paddock was named. It was edged, this waterless lake, with a shore of white, cement-hard claypan lying like a bridal ribbon at the foot of swamp gums crowned with brilliant green foliage. The girl uttered a sharp exclamation, and her father unconsciously braked the car to a halt.

In the centre of the lake, and facing towards them, rested a small low-winged monoplane varnished a bright red.

Chapter Two

Aerial Flotsam

“THAT’S STRANGE!” Nettlefold said softly, still sitting in the halted car and gazing across the flat surface of the lake. In area the lake was some two miles long and about one mile wide. On it grew widely spaced tussock-grass which, because of its spring lushness, the kangaroos had eaten down to within an inch of the ground. Had Emu Lake been filled with water-as it had been after the deluge of 1908-it would have been a veritable bushjewel. Now the colouring of the lake itself was drab. Without the water it was like a ring from which the jewel had fallen, leaving the mere setting.