causing us from our Northerly course to travel day after day against the
grain of the country. An Easterly or Westerly course would have been
infinitely less laborious, as in that case we could have travelled along
the bottom of the trough between two ridges for a great distance before
having to cross over any. The troughs and waves seem to be corrugations
in the surface of greater undulations; for during a day's march or so, on
reaching the top of one ridge, our view forwards was limited to the next
ridge, until a certain point was reached, from which we could see in
either direction; and from this point onwards the ridges sank before us
for a nearly equal distance, and then again they rose, each ridge higher
than the last. Words can give no conception of the ghastly desolation and
hopeless dreariness of the scene which meets one's eyes from the crest of
a high ridge. The barren appearance of the sand is only intensified by
the few sickly and shrunken gums that are dotted over it. In the troughs
occasional clumps of shrubs, or scrubs, [e.g., Mulga (ACACIA ANAEURA),
grevillea, hakea, ti-tree (MELALEUCA) and in the northern portion desert
oaks (CASUARINA DESCAINEANA)] or small trees are met with, and everywhere
are scattered tussocks of spinifex. True it is, though, that even this
poverty-stricken plant has its uses, for it serves to bind the sand and
keep the ridges, for the most part, compact. Where spinifex does not
grow, for instance on the tops of the ridges, one realises how impossible
a task it would be to travel for long over banks of loose sand.

I find that my estimate for the average height of the sand-ridges is
considerably lower than that of Colonel Warburton. It is interesting,
therefore, to compare his account of these ridges, though it must be
remembered that Colonel Warburton was travelling on a westerly course,
and we from our northerly direction only traversed country previously
seen by him, for the short distance that our sight would command, at the
point of intersection of our two tracks. In an editorial note in his book