ot but congratulate ourselves in having
such a place to fall back upon, if we should be forced to retreat, as it
had all the promise of durability for some weeks to come. We overtook the
drays far upon the plains, and continued our journey for twenty miles,
when I halted on a bare piece of sandy ground on which there were a few
tussocks of grass, and a small puddle of water. On travelling over the
plain we found it undulating, with shining hollows in which it was
evident water sometimes collects. The stones, with which the ground was
so thickly covered as to exclude vegetation, were of different lengths,
from one inch to six, they had been rounded by attrition, were coated
with oxide of iron, and evenly distributed. In going over this dreary
waste the horses left no track, and that of the cart was only visible
here and there. From the spot on which we stopped no object of any kind
broke the line of the horizon; we were as lonely as a ship at sea, and as
a navigator seeking for land, only that we had the disadvantage of an
unsteady compass, without any fixed point on which to steer. The
fragments covering this singular feature were all of the same kind of
rock, indurated or compact quartz, and appeared to me to have had
originally the form of parallelograms, resembling both in their size and
shape the shivered fragments, lying at the base of the northern ranges,
to which I have already had occasion to call attention.

Although the ground on which we slept was not many yards square, and
there was little or nothing on it to eat, the poor animals, loose as they
were, did not venture to trespass on the adamantine plain by which they
were on all sides surrounded.

On the 27th we continued onwards, obliged to keep the course by taking
bearings on any prominent though trifling object in front. At ten miles
there was a sensible fall of some few feet from the level of the Stony
Desert, as I shall henceforth call it, and we descended into a belt of
polygonum of about two miles in breadth, that separated it from another
feature, apparently of equal extent but of very different character. This
was an earthy plain, on which likewise there was no vegetation;
resembling in appearance a boundless piece of ploughed land, on which
floods had settled and subsided--the earth seemed to have once been mud
and then dried. It had been impossible to ascertain the fall or dip of
the Stony Desert, but somewhat to the west of our course on the eart