Page:Tracks of McKinlay and party across Australia.djvu/88

 to the expedition. Stuart would have none of it. McKinlay took it in hand, at first with horses, afterwards with a team of bullocks. Nothing equals the slow steady pull of the bullock for mastering the thick and thin, the log, stump, and stone of nature's road in Australia. With the skilful bullock-driving of Ned Palmer, a marvellously long step of the rugged journey was accomplished; but although the cart did wonders, it must needs be given up. It was slow as the tortoise, but rarely as sure. All Ned's skill could not pilot "the wheels" against the laws of gravitation. Yesterday they were over their axles in Jones's swamp, and to-day they disappeared like a shot over the perpendicular ledge of Smith's Creek. To recover from disasters, indeed, is as much the forte of a true bullock-driver as to avoid them. The dray ever emerges triumphant from everything. Ned, like a geologist, only requires time; but time, in a flying march across Australia, is a costly requirement. The cart has been daily weighed in a balance of accumulating deficiences [sic], till at length the climax of its fate comes with the heavy rains encountered in the desert country. Conveyed to the top of a sand hill, it is buried along with such of the outfit it had carried as cannot be otherwise provided for. So the cart is abandoned, and poor Ned, freed from his ever-troublesome charge, is