Australia Twice Traversed - The Romance Of Exploration, Through Central South Australia, And Western Australia, From 1872 To 1876 By Ernest Giles
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The Dimensions Of This Singular Little Dam Were
Very Small:
The depth was its most satisfactory feature.
It was, as
all native watering places are, funnel-shaped, and to the bottom of
the funnel I could poke a stick about three feet, but a good deal of
that depth was mud; the surface was not more than eight feet long, by
three feet wide, its shape was elliptical; it was not full when we
first saw it, having shrunk at least three feet from its highest
water-mark. I now decided to return by a new and more southerly route
to the depot, hoping to find some other waters on the way. At this dam
we were 160 miles from Eucla Harbour, which I visited last February
with my black boy Tommy and the three horses lost in pushing from
Wynbring to the Finniss. North from Eucla, running inland, is a great
plain. I now wished to determine how far north this plain actually
extended. I was here in scrubs to the north of it. The last night we
camped at the dam was exceedingly cold, the thermometer falling to 26
degrees on the morning of the 16th of August, the day we left. I
steered south-east, and we came out of the scrubs, which had been
thinning, on to the great plain, in forty-nine or fifty miles.
Changing my course here to east, we skirted along the edge of the
plain for twenty-five miles. It was beautifully grassed, and had
cotton and salt-bush on it:
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