"Surely the most God-forsaken on the face of the earth"; and yet we had
worse to follow!

Our rate of travel over the gravel was a small fraction more than two
miles per hour. This I carefully reckoned by timing, taking into account
every halt of ever so small a duration in our march in a due North line
between two latitudes.

In lat. 23 degrees 34 minutes, long. 125 degrees 16 minutes, there rose
before us, visible for several miles, high banks of stones, such as one
sees on either side of the old bed of a river which has altered its
course. The slopes were covered with spinifex and on the top red and
weeping mulga--the latter a graceful little tree, whose bowed head adds
little to the gaiety of one's surroundings. I cannot offer any
explanation of these curious banks, except that, from the appearance of
one or two large flat boulders on the summit, it may be that they were
formed by the entire disintegration of a sandstone cliff, to which decay
has come sooner than to its neighbours further South. Future experience
showed us that further North the gravel becomes small and smaller until
it disappears, the rolling sandhills giving place to regular ridges. If
this is the case viz., that the hills and ranges are gradually rotting
away until they disappear, leaving only gravel behind, which, in its
turn, decays and decays until only sand remains, then in the course of
ages the whole of this region will be covered with ridge upon ridge of
sand formed by the wind, whose powers so far have been checked by the
weight of the gravel. For the sake of future generations I hope my
reasoning is incorrect.

As I stood on the stony bank, I could see several native smokes to the
eastward. Determined to take advantage of any help extended to us by