There was
not a sign of a blade of grass, or anything else that horses could
eat, except a few yellow immortelles of a large coarse description,
and these they did not care very much for. The camels, on the
contrary, could take large and evidently agreeable mouthfuls of the
leaves of the great bushes of the Leguminosae, which abounded. The
conduct of the two kinds of animals was so distinctly different as to
arouse the curiosity of all of us; the camels fed in peaceful content
in the shade of the bushes from which they ate, and never went out of
sight, seeming to take great interest in all we did, and evidently
thoroughly enjoying themselves, while the horses were plunging about
in hobbles over the sandhills, snorting and fretting with fright and
exertion, and neither having or apparently desiring to get anything to
eat. Their sole desire was to get away as far as possible from the
camels. The supply of water here seemed to be unlimited, but the sandy
sides of the well kept falling in; therefore we got some stakes of
mallee, and saplings of the native poplar (Codonocarpus cotinifolius,
of the order of Phytolacceae), and thoroughly slabbed it, at least
sufficiently for our time. This place, as I said before, was
exceedingly hot, lying at the bottom of a hollow amongst the
sandhills, and all we could see from the tops of any of those near us
was a mass of higher, darker, and more forbidding undulations of a
similar kind.
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