Page:Tracks of McKinlay and party across Australia.djvu/166

 return, they will doubtless get all the glory of the exploit; at least, so it is with the world generally. Eighteen inches of water in well; temperature only 99° at noon.

Poor Burke and Wills! it is sad to think that those intrepid fellows should have been the first to cross this great continent, the vast deserts of the interior, and supposed to have arrived within almost a "cooey" of the settled districts, to have only arrived at their depôt some few hours after the depôt party had left there, under Mr. Brahe—who remained there until he could do so no longer from the illness of his men,—and to have there laid down and died; it was hard just as they had the laurel wreath almost within their grasp, and that so hardly won. I can fancy these poor fellows, after digging, finding the note stating that Brahe had only left that morning. It must have been a fearful disappointment to them; fancy, reader, just place yourself in their situation, seeing the date of that note after arriving from such an expedition, weary and faint with hunger and exhaustion, clothes in rags, and perhaps hardly a boot to your foot; fancy, I say, arriving a few hours after your friends had gone, who you fully expected would be there to give you help and succour, and finding yourself too feeble to follow in their track. They, as it afterwards turned out, were only fourteen miles away.