Flies Were Troublesome, And Very Busy At Our Eyes; Soon After Daylight, And Immediately After Sunrise, It Became Quite Hot.

Traversing first the racecourse plain, we then entered some mulga scrub; the mulga is an acacia, the wood extremely hard.

It grows to a height of twenty to thirty feet, but is by no means a shady or even a pretty tree; it ranges over an enormous extent of Australia. The scrub we now entered had been recently burnt near the edge of the plain; but the further we got into it, the worse it became. At seven miles we came to stones, triodia, and mallee, a low eucalyptus of the gumtree family, growing generally in thick clumps from one root: its being rooted close together makes it difficult travelling to force one's way through. It grows about twenty feet high. The higher grade of eucalypts or gum-trees delight in water and a good soil, and nearly always line the banks of watercourses. The eucalypts of the mallee species thrive in deserts and droughts, but contain water in their roots which only the native inhabitants of the country can discover. A white man would die of thirst while digging and fooling around trying to get the water he might know was preserved by the tree, but not for him; while an aboriginal, upon the other hand, coming to a mallee-tree, after perhaps travelling miles through them without noticing one, will suddenly make an exclamation, look at a tree, go perhaps ten or twelve feet away, and begin to dig.

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