By This Time We Had Used Up All The Water We Could Find, And Had To Go Somewhere Else To Get More.

A terrible piece of next-to-impassable scrub, four or five miles through, lay right in our path; it also rose and fell into ridges and gullies in it.

We saw one of the Mus conditor, or building rats' nests, which is not the first we have seen by many on this expedition. The scrub being so dense, it was impossible to see more than two or three of the horses at a time, and three different times some of them got away and tried to give us the slip; this caused a great deal of anxiety and trouble, besides loss of time. Shortly after emerging from the scrubs, we struck a small creek with one or two gumtrees on it; a native well was in the bed, and we managed to get water enough for the horses, we having only travelled six miles straight all day. This was a very good, if not actually a pretty, encampment; there was a narrow strip of open ground along the banks, and good vegetation for the horses. We slept upon the sandy bed of the creek to escape the terrible quantities of burrs which grew all over these wilds.

We steered away nearly west for the highest hills we had seen yesterday; there appeared a fall or gap between two; the scrubs were very thick to-day, as was seen by the state of our pack-bags, an infallible test, when we stopped for the night, during the greater part of which we had to repair the bags.

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