Night overtook me, and I had to encamp in the
scrubs, having travelled nearly forty miles. A few drops of rain fell;
it may have benefited the horses, but to me it was a nuisance. I was
up, off my sandy couch early enough, but had to wait for daylight
before I could get the horses; they had wandered away for miles back
towards the camp, and I had the same difficulties over again when
getting them back to where the saddles were. In seven or eight miles
after starting I got out of the scrubs. At the foot of the mountain
for which I was steering there was a little creek or gully, with some
eucalypts where I struck it. It was, as all the others had been,
scrubby, rocky, and dry. I left the horses and ascended to the top,
about 900 feet above the scrubs which surrounded it. The horizon was
broken by low ranges nearly all round, but scrubs as usual intervened
between them. I descended and walked into dozens of gullies and rocky
places, and I found some small holes and basins, but all were dry. At
this spot I was eighty miles from a sufficient supply of water; that
at the camp, forty-five miles away, may be gone by the time I return.
Under these circumstances I could not go any farther west. It was now
evening again.
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