ladder-building. I had made myself frightfully hot by chopping down trees for the sides of it, but it was completed, the rungs were attached and George and Van had arrived. I had stripped down to trousers and was cutting a stick with which to deal with the snake when I backed into a tree in which black ants were nesting. They were all over me in a minute and one crawled into my ear and, after tramping all over my ear drum with his big feet, decided to bite it. Van poked around with a twig and presumably squashed the ant but the bite throbbed for quite a while inside my head, completely destroying the merry illusion I had had of us three marching into the mine like Snow-White's dwarfs, carrying our somewhat crude ladder and singing "It's off to work we go." Now it is evening, George and Van are working on the bats they captured, I have set my light trap in the bush, brought it back again and have finished this day's entry in the journal. The great snake hunt, fruitless but not with- out excitement, is over. Gordon's mine is a thing of the past. Sunday, 13 June 1948. George and Len went off this morning with some of the road construction men who have a camp some miles west of here. I am not quite sure where they went to or what they did there. I spent most of the morning changing a tire on one of the bikes. The afternoon and evening were just about the usual thing. I consider it a great mistake to continue seven days and seven evenings at the same thing and I believe there should be one day anyway devoted to any kind of different form of routine. Of course our time is limited but I still think better results and harder work would be obtained if one day was given over to rest or whatever form of relaxation one desired. What would happen, in all probability, is that each man would continue to work but would not feel under any compulsion. The others do not feel any compulsion anyway but they are unable to understand the feelings of anybody who has no particular interest in science and its subjects. That sounds rather like heresy but it is not meant to be. I have seen men on many sorts of jobs and have handled them and a break once a week never did anybody any harm or slowed the job down. On the contrary, they worked so much better after a rest that the lost time was more than made up. However, I am not in charge and one can only do as one is told. Monday, 14 June 1948. This was a fairly long morning and I covered about seven miles, I estimate, collecting several things that I have not previously had and ending up, I believe, at the Fisher mine, the abandoned Scarlet Pimpernel. The weather was dreary in the extreme, a heavy drizzle of rain going on most of the time. I was pleased with the things I had garnered but arrived back tired, wet and with sore feet. I had a heavy heart too because it came upon me how tough it is to be a gold miner. Nothing of any value ever came from the Scarlet Pimpernel, which is just a straight shaft, simply a hole in the ground , to show for goodness knows how many hours of heart-breaking work. The ground there is different from the neighborhood of Gordon's mine; the soil is much more yellow and sandy, the iron stone is there of course but not in sufficient quantity to give the earth the reddish tinge it has here. I did not attempt to go down the Scarlet Pimpernel - there was nothing there and I could see to the bottom of it. I was very glad to get my teeth into lunch when I got back to camp though. It was extra fine, fresh tongue, tinned tomatoes, Joe's best hot rolls and tea. I felt I had fully earned it.