about eight this morning and reached by five P.M. our
encampment of the 12th and 13th of June. On the way the ranges on our
right, as they rose in view, afforded some relief to our eyes, so long
accustomed to a horizon as flat as the ocean; and a gentle cooling breeze
from the east felt very different from the parching west winds to which
we had been exposed. This day and the one before were warm, and breathed
most gratefully of spring. We recrossed a gravel bed of irregular
fragments of quartz and flint at the base of some slight hills which
reach from the range to the river. Between these undulations were soft
plains the surface of which was cracked and full of holes; and it seemed
that the torrents which fall from the hills are imbibed by this thirsty
earth. As we approached our camp the dogs were sent after two emus, and
at dusk one of them returned having killed his bird, though we did not
find it until early next morning. The emu came to hand however in good
time even then, for the men had been long living on salt provisions. Our
former lagoon had become a quagmire of mud and we were forced to send for
water from the river. The pigeons and parrots which swarmed about this
hole at dusk, the quantity of feathers, and the tracks of emus and
kangaroos around it, showed how scarce this essential element had become
in the back country. At such small pools water becomes an object of
desire and contest and, so long as it lasts, these spots in times of
scarcity are invariably haunted by that omnivorous biped man, to whom
both birds and quadrupeds fall an easy prey. We however during a sojourn
of more than two months in the Australian wilderness had been abundantly
supplied with the finest water from that extraordinary river which we had
been tracing, and without which those regions would be deserts,
inaccessible to and uninhabitable by either man or beast.

RESOLVE TO AVOID THE NATIVES.

August 5.

As the last journey had been a long one and we had some rough ground
before us, we rested a day here while the blacksmith repaired one of the
cartwheels. The calls of the natives were heard very early in the
morning, and two fellows came to our men on the river, impudently
demanding tomahawks; but little attention was paid to them, and they did
not visit the camp. We had no longer any desire to communicate with the
aborigines, for we had too long in vain held out to them the olive branch
and made them presents; and as we coul