There Was Not A Sign Of A Blade Of Grass, Or Anything Else That Horses Could Eat, Except A Few Yellow Immortelles Of A Large Coarse Description, And These They Did Not Care Very Much For.

The camels, on the contrary, could take large and evidently agreeable mouthfuls of the leaves of the great bushes of the Leguminosae, which abounded.

The conduct of the two kinds of animals was so distinctly different as to arouse the curiosity of all of us; the camels fed in peaceful content in the shade of the bushes from which they ate, and never went out of sight, seeming to take great interest in all we did, and evidently thoroughly enjoying themselves, while the horses were plunging about in hobbles over the sandhills, snorting and fretting with fright and exertion, and neither having or apparently desiring to get anything to eat. Their sole desire was to get away as far as possible from the camels. The supply of water here seemed to be unlimited, but the sandy sides of the well kept falling in; therefore we got some stakes of mallee, and saplings of the native poplar (Codonocarpus cotinifolius, of the order of Phytolacceae), and thoroughly slabbed it, at least sufficiently for our time. This place, as I said before, was exceedingly hot, lying at the bottom of a hollow amongst the sandhills, and all we could see from the tops of any of those near us was a mass of higher, darker, and more forbidding undulations of a similar kind. These undulations existed to the east, north, and west, while to the south we could but dimly see the mirage upon the plain we had recently traversed. The water here was fresh and sweet, and if the temperature had not been quite so hot, we might have enjoyed our encampment here; but there was no air, and we seemed to be at the bottom of a funnel. The old black fellow, Jimmy, whom Mr. Richards had obtained as a guide to show me some waters in the country to the eastwards, informed us, through the interpretation of Mr. Murray, that he knew of only one water in any direction towards the west, and this he said was a small rock water-hole called Paring.

The following day Mr. Murray and I rode there with old Jimmy, and found it to be a wretched little hole, lying nearly west-north-west about fourteen miles away; it contained only a few gallons of water, which was almost putrid from the number of dead and decaying birds, rats, lizards, rotten leaves, and sticks that were in it; had it been full it would have been of no earthly use to me. Old Jimmy was not accustomed to riding, and got out of his latitude once or twice before we reached the place. He was, however, proud of finding himself in the novel position, albeit rather late in life, of riding upon horseback, and if I remember rightly did not tumble off more than three or four times during the whole day.

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