From This Singular Cup We Obtained A Sufficient Supply Of That Fluid So Terribly Scarce In This Region.

We had to fill a canvas bucket with a pint pot to water our horses, and we outspanned for the remainder of the day at this exceedingly welcome spot.

There were a few hundred acres of excellent grass land, and the horses did remarkably well during the night. The day had been very hot; the thermometer in the shade at this rock stood at 106 degrees.

This proved a most abominable camp; it swarmed with ants, and they kept biting us so continually, that we were in a state of perpetual motion nearly all the time we were there. A few heat-drops of rain fell. I was not sorry to leave the wretched place, which we left as dry as the surrounding void. We continued our west course over sandhills and through scrub and spinifex. The low ridges of which the western horizon was formed, and which had formerly looked perfectly flat, was reached in five miles; no other view could be got. A mile off was a slightly higher point, to which we went; then the horizon, both north and west of the same nature, ran on as far as could be seen, without any other object upon which to rest the eye. There were a few little gullies about, which we wasted an hour amongst in a fruitless search for water. The Bitter Water Creek now lay south of us; I was not at all satisfied at our retreat from it.

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