ted of the common red earth covered with the acacia bushes and
scrub of the interior plains. The land at the point opposite was lower
and sandy, and a slight rapid was occasioned in the stream by a ridge of
ironstone.

(*Footnote. See comparative sections of these and other rivers to one
scale on the General Map in Volume 1.)

May 24.

It was quite impossible to say on what part of the Murray, as laid down
by Captain Sturt, we had arrived; and we were therefore obliged to feel
our way just as cautiously as if we had been upon a river unexplored. The
ground was indeed a tolerable guide, especially after we found that this
river also had bergs which marked the line of separation between the
desert plain or scrub and the good grassy forest-land of which the
river-margin consisted. As we proceeded I found it best to keep along the
bergs as much as possible in order to avoid ana-branches* of the river.
Where the bergs receded forest land with the goborro or dwarf-box
intervened. In travelling over ground of this description we crossed, at
two miles from the camp, a dry creek or branch, and another at a mile and
a quarter further.

(*Footnote. Having experienced on this journey the inconvenient want of
terms relative to rivers I determined to use such of those recommended by
Colonel Jackson in his able paper on the subject, in the Journal of the
Royal Geographical Society for 1833, as I might find necessary. They are
these:
Tributary: Any stream adding to the main trunk.
Ana-branches: Such as after separation unite.
Berg, bergs: Heights now at some distance, once the immediate banks of a
river or lake.
Bank: That part washed by the existing stream.
Border: The vegetation at the water's edge, forest trees, or quays of
granite, etc.
Brink: The water's edge.
Margin: The space between the brinks and the bergs.)

MEET WITH A TRIBE.

Soon after we entered a small plain bounded on the west by another dry
channel, and beyond this we were prevented from continuing in the
direction in which I wished to travel by a creek full of water, obliging
us to turn northward and eastward of north until I at length found a
crossing-place, and just as we perceived smoke at some distance beyond
the other bank. To this smoke Piper had hastened, and when I reached a
plain beyond the creek I saw him carrying on a flying conversation with
an old man and several gins who were retiring in a north-west direction
to a wood about a mile distant.