r camels.
All through, we adhered to the same plan as before, viz., doing our day's
march without a halt (excepting of course the numerous stoppages entailed
by broken nose-lines, the disarrangement of a pack, or the collapse of a
camel), having no food or water from daylight until camping-time. This,
without our previous training, would have been an almost impossible task,
for each ridge had to be climbed--there was no going round them or
picking out a low place, no tacking up the slope--straight ahead, up one
side, near the top a wrench and a snap, down goes a camel, away go the
nose-lines, a blow for the first and a knot for the second, over the
crest and down, then a few paces of flat going, then up again and down
again, and so on day after day. The heat was excessive--practically there
was no shade.

The difficulties of our journey were increased by the necessity of
crossing the ridges almost at right angles. With almost heart-breaking
regularity they kept their general trend of E. by N. and W. by S.,
causing us from our Northerly course to travel day after day against the
grain of the country. An Easterly or Westerly course would have been
infinitely less laborious, as in that case we could have travelled along
the bottom of the trough between two ridges for a great distance before
having to cross over any. The troughs and waves seem to be corrugations
in the surface of greater undulations; for during a day's march or so, on
reaching the top of one ridge, our view forwards was limited to the next
ridge, until a certain point was reached, from which we could see in
either direction; and from this point onwards the ridges sank before us
for a nearly equal distance, and then again they rose, each ridge higher
than the last. Words can give no conception of the ghastly desolation and
hopeless dreariness of the scene which meets one's eyes from the crest of
a high ridge. The barren appearance of the sand is only intensified by
the few sickly and shrunken gums that are dotted over it. In the troughs
occasional clumps of shrubs, or scrubs, [e.g., Mulga (ACACIA ANAEURA),
grevillea, hakea, ti-tree (MELALEUCA) and in the northern portion desert
oaks (CASUARINA DESCAINEANA)] or small trees are met with, and everywhere
are scattered tussocks of spinifex. True it is, though, that even this
poverty-stricken plant has its uses, for it serves to bind the sand and
keep the ridges, for the most part, compact. Where spinifex does not