My position for Family Well is lat. 22 degrees 40 minutes, long. 125
degrees 54 minutes. The well, as already stated, is situated at the foot
of the southern slope of a high sand-ridge. This ridge is the first of a
series of parallel banks of sand which extend, with occasional breaks,
from lat. 22 degrees 41 minutes to 19 degrees 20 minutes - a distance of
nearly 250 miles in a straight line. From September 16th to November 16th
we were never out of sight of a sand ridge, and during that time travelled
420 miles, taking into account all deviations consequent upon steering for
smokes and tracking up natives, giving an average of not quite seven miles
a day, including stoppages. This ghastly desert is somewhat broken in its
northern portion by the occurrence of sandstone tablelands, the Southesk
Tablelands; the southern part, however, viz., from lat. 22 degrees 41
minutes to lat. 20 degrees 45 minutes presents nothing to the eye but
ridge upon ridge of sand, running with the regularity of the drills in a
ploughed field. A vast, howling wilderness of high, spinifex-clad ridges
of red sand, so close together that in a day's march we crossed from sixty
to eighty ridges, so steep that often the camels had to crest them on
their knees, and so barren and destitute of vegetation (saving spinifex)
that one marvels how even camels could pick up a living. I estimate their
average vertical height from trough to crest at fifty to sixty feet.
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