Page:Tracks of McKinlay and party across Australia.djvu/360

 The network of these creeks, and the bog and swamp that appear to fringe the southern shore of Carpentaria, are a sad check to the enthusiasm that might naturally be otherwise called forth upon the successful accomplishment of so great a journey. On the 20th they can reach only within from four to five miles of the sea, and on the 21st they joyfully commence the return to home and the civilized world.

Geographically speaking, we are now within the tropical boundary, but the extra-tropical features still follow us. The weather is fitfully hot and cold, and the nights sometimes bitterly cold, and still there is the ominous spinifex, the sign of a poor soil, such as has not the advantage of regular tropical rains. There are still the marks of great and sudden flooding—the symptoms of a precarious rain supply. At Elder's Creek, for instance, reached on 28th April, there were the marks of a recent great flood, which had left its traces in logs, grass, and rubbish, at a height of thirty or forty feet above the travellers as they lay down to sleep, peaceably enough now, on the sand in the bed of the creek. Tropical indications, however, gradually increase as the party proceed northward. Here they pluck an edible fruit growing on a palm tree, there the dense and substantial vegetation shows it is no longer the creature of a casual shower, and every