ful for any plants that may spring up, or that the heat bakes the
soil so that nothing can force itself through. There was little, if any
grass to be seen; but the mesembryanthemum reappeared upon it, with other
salsolaceous plants. The former was of a new variety, with flowers on a
long slender stalk, heaps of which had been gathered by the natives for
the seed. Of the timber of these regions there was none; a few gum-trees
near the creeks, with box-trees on the flats, and a few stunted acacia
and hakea on the small hills, constituted almost the whole. Water boiled
on this plain at 212 degrees; that is to say at our camp were we slept,
about two miles advanced into it, but the plain extended about five miles
further to the eastward. After crossing this on the following morning, we
traversed a country which Mr. Browne informed me was very similar to that
near Lake Torrens. It consisted of sand banks, or drifts, with large bare
patches at intervals: the whole bearing testimony to the violence of the
rains that must sometimes deluge it. We then traversed a succession of
flats (I call them so because they did not deserve the name of plains)
separated from each other by patches of red sand and clay, that were not
more than a foot and a half above the surface of the flats. At nine miles
the country became covered with low scrub, and we soon after passed the
dry bed of a lagoon, about a mile in circumference, on which there was a
coating of salt and gypsum resting on soft black mud. About a mile from
this we passed a new tree, similar to one we had seen on the Cawndilla
plain. From this point the land imperceptibly rose, until at length we
found ourselves on some sandy elevations thickly covered with scrub of
acacia, almost all dead, but there was a good deal of grass around them,
and the spot might at another season, and if the trees had been in leaf,
have looked pretty. We pushed through this scrub, the soil being a bright
red sand for nine miles, when we suddenly found ourselves at the base of
a small stony hill, of about fifty feet in height. From the summit we
overlooked the region round about. To the eastward, as a medium point, it
was covered with a dense scrub, that extended to the base of a range of
hills, distant about 33 miles, the extremities of which bore 71 degrees
and 152 degrees respectively from us. But although the country under them
was covered with brush, the hills appeared to be clear and denuded of
brushes