t
periods arisen. The surface of the plains nearest the river is unlike
any part of the earth's face that the travellers had elsewhere seen. It
was clear of vegetation, like a fallow-field, but less level, and quite
full of holes, big enough to receive the whole leg, and sometimes the
body, of the unfortunate persons who might slip into them. Galloping or
trotting in such a country was out of the question, and as the surface
of this dry and cracked soil was soft and loose, it was very fatiguing
for draught. Six of the bullocks accompanying the expedition never
returned from the Darling. Yet, how much preferable was the country,
even in this state, to that in which a flood would have placed it; for,
had rainy weather, or any overflowing of the river, happened, travelling
upon the banks of the Darling would have become absolutely impossible.

[14] Although the basin of this river extends so far towards the east,
on its westerly bank, that is, _towards the interior_, a desert country
stretches itself to an unknown distance, from which it does not appear
to receive any increase of its waters at all deserving of notice. From
two hills, seventy miles apart, extensive views were gained of this
western desert, in which no smoke was seen, indicating the presence of
natives, nor even any appearance of trees; the whole country being
covered with a thick bush or scrub. For the four winter months spent
by Mitchell near the Darling, neither rain nor yet dew fell, and the
winds from the west and north-west, hot and parching, seemed to blow
over a region in which no humidity remained.

[15] So in Major Mitchell's work, vol. i. p. 298; but the same author
is quoted (more correctly it would seem from the map), by Montgomery
Martin, as stating that "The Darling does not, in a course of _three_
hundred miles, receive a single river."--See MARTIN'S _New South
Wales_, p. 82.

[16] By _dry season_, or _wet season_, in Australia, we are not to
understand, as in England, a _dry_ or _wet summer_, but a series of
_dry_ or _wet years_. At the very bottom of some of the dried-up lakes
were found sapling trees of ten years' growth, which had evidently been
killed by the return of the waters to their long-forsaken bed.

But the river Darling itself, though it appears as a principal and
independent stream during so long a course, is, we have little reason to
doubt, no more than an important tributary to the