Cattle Driven Over The Country We Have
Passed, By Short Stages, And During The Proper Season, Would Even Fatten
On The Road.
When we approached the water-hole on which we were going to encamp, John
observed a fine large Iguana in the water, which was so strikingly
coloured that he thought it different from those we had previously seen.
Xyris, Philydrum, a species of Xerotes, and an aromatic spreading herb,
grew in great abundance round the water. I found a great quantity of the
latter in the stomach of the emu. A species of Crotolaria, two or three
feet high, with simple woolly oblong or oblongo-lanceolate leaves, and
with a beautiful green blossom of the form and size of that of Kennedya
rubicunda, grew in the bed of the river. Great numbers of large bright
yellow hornets, with some black marks across the abdomen, visited the
water. Flies were exceedingly troublesome: but the mosquitoes annoyed us
very rarely, and only where water was very abundant. The nights have been
very dewy, but not cold. The wind in the morning from the south-east,
veering round to the northward during the day.
Sept. 9. - We travelled north-west by north, and for several miles,
through a scrubby stringy-bark forest, when we came to steep sandstone
ridges, composed of a hard flaggy horizontally stratified rock. Higher
ranges were seen to the W.N.W. and west; and I found myself fairly caught
between rocky hills when I least expected them, but hoped to enter upon a
country corresponding in its character with the low coast marked down in
the map, in this latitude.
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