‘…resembling parsnip; very bitter.’ Alice described meeting people travelling in dry country carrying little water who used this root ‘resembling a large turnip’. Not easy to find and difficult to recognize ‘for it had only a twiggy stem and sparse nondescript leaves; two feet underground its root was swollen to the size of a half-grown turnip’, but sometimes you would dig under the tell-tale leaves and find only a shrivelled root ‘the size of a pea, powdery and blighted.’ In very dry seasons it was called 'Wahlp-pa', the root was small and the juice was white, scarce and bitter. Alice described tasting a fragment of the root and how it felt in her mouth – painful but effective in quenching thirst.