uate the
memory of their occupants. And who could desire a nobler monument than
the everlasting hills?

Austin now came to the upper tributaries of the Murchison only to find
them waterless. Even the deep cut channel of the Murchison itself was
dry. They crossed the river, but beyond it all their efforts to penetrate
westward were in vain. They had fought their way to within one hundred
miles of Shark's Bay, but they had then been so long without water that
further advance meant certain death. Even during the retreat to the
Murchison, the lives of the horses were saved only by the accidental
discovery of a small native well in a most improbable situation, namely,
in the middle of a bare ironstone plain. Their only course now was to
fall back on the Murchison, hoping that they would find water at their
crossing. Austin pushed on ahead of the main body, and struck the river
twenty-five miles below their previous crossing, to make the tantalising
discovery that the pools of water on which they had fixed their hopes
were hopelessly salt.

A desperate and vain search was made to the southward, during a day of
fierce and terrible heat; but on the next day, having made for some small
hills they had sighted, they providentially found both water and grass.
The whole party rested at this spot, which was gratefully named Mount
Welcome.

Nothing daunted by the sufferings he had undergone, Austin now made
another attempt to reach Shark's Bay. On the way to the Murchison, they
had induced an old native to come with them to point out the
watering-places of the blacks. At first he was able to show them one or
two that in all probability they would have missed, but after they had
crossed the Murchison and proceeded some distance to the westward, the
water the native had relied on was found to have disappeared, and it was
only after the most acute sufferings from thirst and the loss of some
more horses, that they managed to struggle back to Mount Welcome.

Austin's conduct during these terrible marches seems to have bordered on
the heroic. Whilst his companions fell away one by one and lay down to
die, and the one native of the wilds was cowering weeping under a bush,
he toiled on and managed to reach a little well which the blackfellow had
formerly shown him. Without resting, he tramped back with water to revive
his exhausted companions.

At Mount Welcome they found the water on the point of giving out, and
weak and exhausted thou