r that purpose, and telling them I
once had been a black fellow. They spoke but little English, and it
was mostly through a few words that Alec Ross knew, of the Peake,
Macumba, or Alberga tribes that we could talk to each other at all.
After this we got them map-making on the sand. They demonstrated that
the Ferdinand, which we had left, and had still on our right or west
of us, running south, swept round suddenly to the eastwards and now
lay across the country in front of us; that in its further progress it
ran into, and formed a lake, then continuing, it at last reached a big
salt lake, probably Lake Eyre; they also said we should get water by
digging in the sand in the morning, when we struck the Ferdinand
channel again. Soon after we started and were proceeding on our
course, south 26 degrees west, from the rock-water, the natives all
fell back and we saw no more of them. In twenty miles we came to the
creek, and turning down its channel eastwards we found the well of
which they had told us. There was plenty of water in it, no doubt, but
we did not require it. The well seemed rather deep. We followed the
creek for some distance, at length it became very undefined, and the
gum timber disappeared. Only a few acacia bushes now indicated the
flow of the water over the grassy mulga flats, which wound about so
much around sandhills in the scrub, that I left the creek, and pushed
on now for the South Australian Telegraph Line.

I will now give a rapid account of what I said was a narrow escape
from death at those rock-holes we had just left. I may say in passing,
that what I have recorded as my travels and explorations in Australia
in these volumes, are probably not half of what I have really
performed, only I divide them under the two headings of public and
private explorations.

In the month of December, 1882, I was in this part of the world again.
During the six years that had elapsed since my last visit in 1876, a
survey party had reached these ranges on a trigonometrical survey, and
upon its return, the officer in charge reported having had some
trouble and a collision with the natives of the Everard Range. I
suppose my second visit occurred two years after that event. I was
accompanied on that journey by a very young friend, named Vernon
Edwards, from Adelaide, and two young men named Perkins and Fitz, the
latter being cook, and a very good fellow he proved to be, but Perkins
was nothing of the sort. I had a black