custom, but what it signifies even Warri cannot explain.  Breaden has a theory that they point to the next water-hole.  This may be, but, unless for a stranger’s benefit, quite unnecessary, as every black knows his waters; and if for a stranger it is equally peculiar, for his welcome is usually a bang on the head!  It may be that messengers or those who, wishing to trade from tribe to tribe, get the free passage of the district, are thus guided on their way.  The number of pyramids may represent so many days’ march.

There must have been some open water besides this dirty rock-hole, but having sufficient for present requirements we did not waste time in further search, and on September 2nd turned again to the North.  On this course we continued until September 6th, the country showing no change whatever, which constrained me to say of it, so I find in my diary, “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 Nature, to spare no pains in the all-important matter of finding water, to let nothing pass that might assist us on our way, so that if it was our fate to go under in the struggle I should not be assailed by the thought that I had neglected opportunities, determined, in fact, always to act for the best, so far as I could