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The timber about here is very large, consisting of black oaks, mallee, mulga, the native peach, the nut, and numerous low scrubs. The grass is good in some places. The mountain that I am steering for is further off than I anticipated; we got sight of it a short time before we halted; it seems to be very high, and I expect something good will be the result of our visit to it to-morrow.
The country all the way consisted first, of very high and heavy sandhills, with mallee scrubs and thick spinifex, with occasional grassy flats between, but at one place we actually crossed a space of nearly ten miles of open, good grassy limestone country. We travelled very slowly over this region.
I remember he had a fight with a little bull-calf, about a week old, that came in with a wild heifer, and Aileen made as much of his pluck as if it had been a mallee scrubber. The calf baaed and butted at Jim, as even the youngest of them will, if they've the wild blood in 'em, and nearly upset him; he was only a bit of a toddler.
It consisted entirely of high, red sandhills with casuarinas and low mallee, which formed the horizon at about ten miles. The long range that had brought us so far to the west was at an end; it had fallen off slightly in altitude towards its western extremity, and a deep bed of rolling sandhill country, covered with desert vegetation, surrounded it on all sides.
The higher grade of eucalypts or gum-trees delight in water and a good soil, and nearly always line the banks of watercourses. The eucalypts of the mallee species thrive in deserts and droughts, but contain water in their roots which only the native inhabitants of the country can discover.
At twenty miles crossed the Douglas, running north through sand hills in a broad valley divided into numerous courses, with dwarf gum-trees, mallee, tea-tree, and numerous other bushes; the bed sandy, and no water. At thirty-five miles struck the lake where the Douglas joins it. There is some water at the mouth of the Douglas, but it is salter than the sea.
The only horizon to be seen was about fifteen miles away, and was simply the rim of an undulation in the dreary scrubs covered with the usual timber that is to say, a mixture of the Eucalyptus dumosa or mallee, casuarinas or black oaks, a few Grevilleas, hakea bushes, with leguminous trees and shrubs, such as mulga, and a kind of harsh-, silver wattle, looking bush.
The mallee we found so dense that not a third of the horses could be seen together, and with great difficulty we managed to reach the foot of a small pine-clad hill lying under the foot of the high bluff before mentioned there a small creek lined with eucalypts ran under its foot. Though our journey to-day was only twelve miles, that distance through such horrible scrubs took us many hours.
The position of this dry basin is in latitude 30 degrees 7' 3", and longitude 124 degrees 41' 2". Since reaching the 125th meridian, my course had been 5 degrees more southerly, and on departing from this wretched basin on the 22nd of September, with animals greatly refreshed and carrying much lighter loads, we immediately entered dense scrubs, composed as usual of mallee, with its friend the spinifex, black oaks, and numerous gigantic mallee-like gum-trees.
Gibson is at Streaky Bay, so that we may be able to get something to eat; we must endure three days' more starving before we shall be able to reach there. Friday, 20th August, Smoky Bay. Started at 7.15. Mallee scrub in some places very dense, in others open, with good grassy plains at intervals, in which I think water could be had by digging; very few birds about, and those small.
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