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A thunder-storm threatened on the 4th, but we had only some light showers: the morning of the 5th was very hot, and the afternoon rainy. Wind from north and north-east. Nights clear. April 6. We travelled about ten miles N. 35 degrees W. over a ridgy, openly timbered, stony and sandy country, and crossed several sandy creeks, in which a species of Melaleuca, and another of Tristania were growing.
The peril of immediate detection was so imminent that, beside it, all other fears were dwarfed into insignificance. Before dawn next morning he had travelled ten miles, and by husbanding his food, he succeeded by the night of the fourth day in accomplishing forty more. Footsore and weary, he lay in a thicket of the thorny melaleuca, and felt at last that he was beyond pursuit.
After crossing several stony rises, in which we had some difficulty in getting our horses over, arrived at a nice broad valley with a creek running through it, course north-west. At a mile it received a large tributary from the east of north, and the bed seems sandy; melaleuca and gum-trees in it; also the bean-tree. The valley is covered with grass from two to four feet high.
This is not the fact; the grass is very thick, and the trees of noble growth; we found many unknown to us, some loaded with fruit; also, several beautiful shrubs covered with flowers; the dwarf orange-tree, the elegant melaleuca, the nutmeg-tree, and the Bengal rose blending its flowers with the fragrant jasmine.
Its width varies from one to two-hundred yards, with a sandy bed, entirely free from fallen timber. Its banks are steep in many places, of white clay and coarse sandstone, and fringed with tall melaleuca, whose long drooping branches and leaves swept the rapid and deep stream.
He thought he recognized the melaleuca, several kinds of mimosa, and the Virginian pine, which has the largest and thickest branches. We loaded ourselves with as much as we could carry, and, in two or three journeys, we had collected sufficient to cover the vessel, and to make a shelter for ourselves, if we were obliged to pass the night on shore.
A great quantity of tea-tree, Melaleuca, grew in the river-bed here; indeed, our progress was completely stopped by it, and we had to cut down timber for some distance to make a passage for the camels before we could get past the place, the river being confined in a glen.
We passed a small scrubby creek, and a long tract of stringy-bark forest, mixed with bloodwood and Pandanus, and patches of Cypress pine. Here we again observed the gum-tree with orange blossoms and large ribbed seed-vessels, which we found at the upper Lynd, and had called Melaleuca gum. Sterculia was frequent, and we collected a great quantity of its ripe seeds.
Of this they were now convinced, but to make certain, agreed to continue travelling down it for two days more, and with this intent camped on a creek coming in from the southward. The margin of the river is generally open and coarsely grassed, timbered with mahogany, bloodwood, and melaleuca, the points of scrubs and brushwood occasionally closing down to the stream.
On the flat, the plateau, and the hillsides, the forest consists of similar trees alike in age and character for all the difference in soil the one tree that does not leave the flat being the tea or melaleuca. In some places the jungle comes down to the water's edge, the long antennae of the lawyer vine toying with the rod-like aerial roots of the mangrove.
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