Page:Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, volume 2.djvu/135

 eye sought anxiously for a rising smoke, as indicative of the presence of the wandering aborigines; but in vain: for, excepting in the immediate neighbourhood of a river of the larger magnitude, these vast solitudes may be fairly said to be almost entirely without inhabitants. We had now all the high grounds on our right hand, or to the east of us, and before us, at north, a level, wooded country. With an anxious curiosity to explore so extraordinary a region, we continued our route on the 26th of May, from a rocky creek, where we had rested upon some tolerable pasture. Our elevation above the sea-shore, we found by our barometer to be one thousand two hundred and twenty-eight feet, and we soon discovered that we had entered a barren waste, over which was spread a loose sand, (the debris of the prevalent rock formation of the eastern hills,) which gave it a desert-like aspect. A blighted kind of the iron-bark tree, (apparently Eucalyptus resinifera,) scarcely twenty-five feet high, clothed its surface, on which were here and there interspersed dense patches of underwood, composed of plants formerly observed on the western skirts of Liverpool Plains. In this stage of our journey we crossed the parallel of 29°, in about the meridian of ]50° 40'; and having very little expectation of meeting with water, in any state, in so arid a region, we were most agreeably surprised to find the channel of a river from eighty to one hundred yards in width, winding its course to the westward. This stream, which received the name of Dumaresq's River, although greatly reduced by drought, presented, nevertheless, a handsome piece of water, half a mile in length, about thirty yards in width, and evidently very deep. My barometer, which I set up on the gravelly bed of the river, gave me only eight hundred and forty feet of elevation above the sea-coast, from which we were distant to the westward about one hundred and seventy English miles.

It was my full intention to have continued my course in the direction of the meridian, at least to the parallel of 27°, before I made the least easting towards the coast-line; this design, however, the existing circumstances of the country we had penetrated compelled me to abandon; for the great debility to which the whole of my horses were reduced, by the labours of the journey through a line of country parched up by the drought, at once obliged me to pursue a more eastern course; in which direction, upon gaining the higher lands, I could alone expect to meet with a better pasture, than that on which they had for some time subsisted.

On our new course to the northward and eastward, we had to struggle through a desert waste for many miles, before we gained a more undulated surface to the eastward of 151°, when the country through which we journeyed for about thirty miles, presented a