Page:Tracks of McKinlay and party across Australia.djvu/364

 blessings. It is very vexing, here we are all ready for a start, camels laden, etc., but Mr. McKinlay says we must wait for the horses, and so we did till 12 o'clock, when we unpacked, unsaddled, and turned them out to feed. I don't suppose we shall get away to-day. Dinner over and no horses, one man sent after sheep and bullocks to bring them into camp again; it was a fine day for travelling, but, alas! here is another delay of a day or more. They all came in about sunset. Mr. McKinlay went out on a voyage of discovery, and thus reports the results:—

"'I took a horse and went to the nearest hill, about seven miles distant, to observe the course of the main creek, but the day proving warm and misty I did not get so distinct a view as I anticipated; it was extensive enough but indistinct, although the elevation I was on must have been more than three thousand feet from level of the creek, and much higher ranges on to west of it; from top of it portions of the main range appear in the far distance at 347½°; no other eminence round the horizon to 95°; the whole intervening space filled with creeks running in all directions towards the main creek that must be distant from the hill I was on easterly, nearly twenty miles, with an apparent northerly course; this hill is detached from the main mass of range and distant from four to five miles. It and the most of the intervening space between the camp and it is literally one mass of quartz and quartz reefs, mica, etc., and on top of range is a sort of flaggy slate, all apparently having undergone the action of fire—this range I have called Sarah's Range; it bears from camp 320° seven miles; a great deal of spinifex and abrupt creeks between camp and it, not a speck of gold visible, but it appears to have undergone the action of fire; this is another day lost. Such detention makes me quite irritable and fidgetty.'"