s done by the
recollection of spots which, to a white man, have no special features
and no guiding points, was really marvellous. We had travelled at
least 120 miles eastward from Youldeh, and when there, this old fellow
had told us that he had not visited any of the places he was going to
take me to since his boyhood; this at the very least must have been
forty years ago, for he was certainly fifty, if not seventy, years
old. The knowledge possessed by these children of the desert is
preserved owing to the fact that their imaginations are untrammelled,
the denizens of the wilderness, having their mental faculties put to
but few uses, and all are concentrated on the object of obtaining food
for themselves and their offspring. Whatever ideas they possess, and
they are by no means dull or backward in learning new ones, are ever
keen and young, and Nature has endowed them with an undying mental
youth, until their career on earth is ended. As says a poet, speaking
of savages or men in a state of nature:--

"There the passions may revel unfettered,
And the heart never speak but in truth;
And the intellect, wholly unlettered,
Be bright with the freedom of youth."

Assuredly man in a savage state, is by no means the unhappiest of
mortals. Old Jimmy's faculties of memory were put to the test several
times during the eight days we were travelling from Youldeh to this
rock. Sometimes when leading us through the scrubs, and having
travelled for some miles nearly east, he would notice a tree or a
sandhill, or something that he remembered, and would turn suddenly
from that point in an entirely different direction, towards some high
and severe sandhill; here he would climb a tree. After a few minutes'
gazing about, he would descend, mount his horse, and go off on some
new line, and in the course of a mile or so he would stop at a tree,
and tell us that when a little boy he got a 'possum out of a hole
which existed in it. At another place he said his mother was bitten by
a wild dog, which she was digging out of a hole in the ground; and
thus we came to Wynbring at last.

A conspicuous mountain--indeed the only object upon which the eye
could rest above the dense scrubs that surrounded us--bore south 52
degrees east from this rock, and I supposed it was Mount Finke. Our
advent disturbed a number of natives; their fresh footprints were
everywhere about the place, and our guide not being at ease in his
mind as to what