The Natives Appear Far Less Friendly To-Day, And No Young Houris Have Visited Us.

Many of the men have climbed into trees in the immediate neighbourhood of the camp, not being allowed in, and are continually peering down at us and our doings, and reporting all our movements to their associates.

At our meal-times they seem especially watchful, and anxious to discover what it is we eat, and where it comes from. Some come occasionally creeping nearer to our shady home for a more extensive view. Wistfully gazing they come -

"And they linger a minute, Like those lost souls who wait, Viewing, through heaven's gate, Angels within it."

By the morning of the following day I was very glad to find that the natives had all departed. Saleh and Tommy were away after the camels, and had been absent so many hours that I was afraid these people might have unhobbled the camels and driven them off, or else attacked the two who were after them. We waited, therefore, for their return in great anxiety, hour after hour. As they only took one gun besides their revolvers, I was afraid they might not be able to sustain an attack, if the natives set upon them. After the middle of the day they turned up, camels and all, which put an end to our fears.

We departed from Mount Gould late in the day, and travelled up the creek our camp was on, and saw several small ponds of clear rain-water, but at the spot where we camped, after travelling fifteen miles, there was none. Mount Gould bore south 56 degrees west from camp. The travelling for about twenty miles up the creek was pretty good. At twenty-seven miles we came to the junction with another creek, where a fine permanent rocky pool of fresh water, with some good-sized fish in it, exists. I named this fine watering-place Saleh's Fish-ponds, after my Afghan camel-driver, who was really a first-rate fellow, without a lazy bone in his body. The greatest requirement of a camel caravan, is some one to keep the saddles in repair, and so avert sore backs. Saleh used to do this admirably, and many times in the deserts and elsewhere I have known him to pass half the night at this sort of work. The management of the camels, after one learns the art, is simple enough; they are much easier to work than a mob of pack-horses; but keeping the saddles right is a task of the hardest nature. In consequence of Saleh's looking after ours so well, we never had any trouble with sore-backed camels, thus escaping a misfortune which in itself might wreck a whole caravan. We kept on farther up our creek, and at a place we selected for a camp we got some water by digging in the channel at a depth of only a few inches in the sandy bed. The country now on both sides of the creek was both stony and scrubby.

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