By This Time It Was Dark, And Totally Impossible To Get The Horses Up The Gully.

We had to get them over a horrible ridge of broken and jumbled rocks, having to get levers and roll away huge boulders, to make something like a track to enable the animals to reach the water.

Time (and labour) accomplishes all things, and in time the last animal's thirst was quenched, and the last drop of water sucked up from every basin. I was afraid it would not be replenished by morning. We had to encamp in the midst of a thicket of a kind of willow acacia with pink bark all in little curls, with a small and pretty mimosa-like leaf. This bush is of the most tenacious nature - you may bend it, but break it won't. We had to cut away sufficient to make an open square, large enough for our packs, and to enable us to lie down, also to remove the huge bunches of spinifex that occupied the space; then, when the stones were cleared away, we had something like a place for a camp. By this time it was midnight, and we slept, all heartily tired of our day's work, and the night being cool we could sleep in comfort. Our first thought in the morning was to see how the basins looked. Mr. Carmichael went up with a keg to discover, and on his return reported that they had all been refilled in the night, and that the trickling continued, but less in volume.

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