Page:Journals of Several Expeditions Made in Western Australia.djvu/135

 valleys there is a vast quantity of feed for stock, but not sheep: coarse grass herbage and brush—they are dry enough in summer to pass over—some of them are several miles in length, and one or two broad. Within five miles of the sea, you come to sand hills, which are as difficult to pass over as the woods, for the horses, being extremely broken; those over which we passed were well calculated for sheep, being covered with an abundance of grass, a pea, thorn, and the peppermint. We had now been absent from Fremantle thirty-three days; we had halted, on account of our horses, six days, and had made, on some days, very little head-way, on one occasion only three miles. We reached the coast, therefore, in twenty-seven days travelling; had we not turned off on the 5th of January, I have not a doubt but that we should have reached our destination in twenty-eight days, including our six days halt, since we should soon have entered upon the country described by Dr. Wilson, and we should have escaped a most difficult march to the coast, and also the disasters and sufferings to which we were exposed while on the coast for nineteen days without provisions, and for several days before we reached it. But then, if I may be permitted to remark it, if this colony prospers,—and from the body of good land in the interior, of the existence of which I have now no doubt,—a certain good will arise from our disasters, since I am tolerably certain it would not have been traversed for years to come; and, consequently, the fact of there being good land, even among these hills, would not have been known to exist. I shall not trouble his Excellency with a long detail of our sufferings; I shall merely state, that we were on the coast for nineteen days, depending entirely upon shell-fish