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Updated: May 31, 2025
We started for the flat-topped hill on the 11th of June. The country was all extremely heavy sandhills, with casuarina and triodia; we had to encamp among them at twenty-three miles, without water. The next morning Formby knocked up, and lay down, and we had to leave him in the scrub. To-day we got over thirty miles, the hill being yet seven or eight miles off.
The rocks bore south 62 degrees west from camp; we travelled over sandhills, through scrub, triodia, and some casuarina country, until we reached the hill in twenty miles. It was composed of broken red sandstone rock, being isolated from the main ridge; other similar heaps were in the vicinity. We soon discovered that there was neither water nor any place to hold it.
The country hereabouts has been nearly all burnt by the natives, and the horses endeavour to pick roads where the dreaded triodia has been destroyed. We passed a few clumps of casuarinas and a few stunted trees with broad, poplar-like leaves. Travelling for twelve miles on this bearing, we struck the Finke again, running nearly north and south.
Fortunately, one box with the instruments, quicksilver, etc., remained firm; everything got bucked and kicked out of the other; buckskin gloves, matches, mineral collection, rifle cartridges, bottles of medicine, eye-water, socks, specimens of plants, etc., all sent flying about in the thick triodia, for the brute went full gallop all round the mob of horses, trying to get rid of the other box and his saddle.
This hill was rugged with broken granite boulders, scrubby with mulga and bushes, and covered with triodia to its summit. To the south a vague and strange horizon was visible; it appeared flat, as though a plain of great extent existed there, but as the mirage played upon it, I could not make anything of it.
I gave my horse another drink, and fixed a water-bag, containing about eight gallons, in a leather envelope up in a tree; and started away like errant knight on sad adventure bound, though unattended by any esquire or shield-bearer. I rode away west, over open triodia sandhills, with occasional dots of scrub between, for twenty miles.
In the evening I ascended a mountain to the north-westward of us. It was very rough, stony, and precipitous, and composed of red sandstone; its summit was some 800 feet above our camp. It had little other vegetation upon it than huge plots of triodia, of the most beautiful and vivid green, and set with the most formidable spines.
On starting from Mount Udor, on the 1st October, our road lay at first over rocks and stones, then for two or three miles through thick scrubs. The country afterwards became a trifle less scrubby, and consisted of sandhills, timbered with casuarina, and covered, as usual, with triodia. In ten miles we passed a low bluff hill, and camped near it, without any water.
I also had fallen into the custom of the country, and had set fire to several extensive beds of triodia, which had burned with unabated fury; so brilliant, indeed, was the illumination that I could see to read by the light.
Leaving the Kegs I always called this place by that name we travelled another twenty miles by night, the country being still covered with small stones and thickly clothed with the tall triodia. There were thin patches of mulga and mallee scrub occasionally.
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