s, and in such cases my passport was unnecessary.

At first the country through which our wanderings led us was hilly and
well wooded, the trees being particularly fine, many of them towering up
to a height of 150 feet or 200 feet. Our principal food consisted of
roots, rats, snakes, opossum, and kangaroo. The physical conditions of
the country were constantly changing as we moved farther eastward, and
Yamba's ingenuity was often sorely taxed to detect the whereabouts of the
various roots necessary for food. It was obviously unfair to expect her
to be familiar with the flora and fauna of every part of the great
Australian Continent. Sometimes she was absolutely nonplused, and had to
stay a few days with a tribe until the women initiated her into the best
methods of cooking the roots of the country. And often we could not
understand the language. In such cases, though, when spoken words were
unlike those uttered in Yamba's country, we resorted to a wonderful sign-
language which appears to be general among the Australian blacks. All
that Yamba carried was a basket made of bark, slung over her shoulder,
and containing a variety of useful things, including some needles made
out of the bones of birds and fish; a couple of light grinding-stones for
crushing out of its shell a very sustaining kind of nut found on the palm
trees, &c. Day after day we walked steadily on in an easterly direction,
guiding ourselves in the daytime by the sun, and in the evening by
opossum scratches on trees and the positions of the ant-hills, which are
always built facing the east. We crossed many creeks and rivers,
sometimes wading and at others time swimming.

Gradually we left the hilly country behind, and after about five or six
weeks' tramping got into an extraordinary desert of red sand, which gave
off a dust from our very tracks that nearly suffocated us. Each water-
hole we came across now began to contain less and less of the precious
liquid, and our daily _menu_ grew more and more scanty, until at length
we were compelled to live on practically nothing but a few roots and
stray rats. Still we plodded on, finally striking a terrible spinifex
country, which was inconceivably worse than anything we had hitherto
encountered. In order to make our way through this spinifex (the
terrible "porcupine grass" of the Australian interior), we were bound to
follow the tracks made by kangaroos or natives, otherwise we should have
made no pr