The
smaller vegetation assumed the familiar similitude to that around the
Mount Olga of my two first horse expeditions. Two wild dog puppies
were seen and caught by my black boy Tommy and Nicholls, in the scrubs
to-day, the fourteenth from the dam. Tommy and others had also found a
few Lowans', Leipoa ocellata, nests, and we secured a few of the
pink-tinted eggs; this was the laying season. These, with the turkey
Mr. Young had shot on the plain, were the only adjuncts to our
supplies that we had obtained from this region. After to-day's stage
there was nothing but the native poplar for the camels to eat, and
they devoured the leaves with great apparent relish, though to my
human taste it is about the most disgusting of vegetables. The
following day, fifteenth from water, we accomplished twenty-six miles
of scrubs. Our latitude here was 30 degrees 17'. The country continued
to rise into sandhills, from which the only views obtainable presented
spaces precisely similar to those already traversed and left behind to
the eastwards, and if it were only from our experience of what we had
passed, that we were to gather intelligence of what was before us in
the future, then would our future be gloomy indeed.
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