The next day we cut some recent horse tracks, the first signs of prospectors we had seen since April 15th, and following them back, hoping for water, came to an empty rock-hole amongst some rough hills of black slate, and in places, blows of quartz.  No colours of gold could be found, nor signs of water, to induce us to stay longer prospecting.  On the 12th we crossed a narrow salt lake and bade adieu to the sand and spinifex.  To commemorate this longed-for day, we afterwards composed numerous poems(?) illustrating our daily life in the desert.  The one considered by us the best, I beg to submit to the indulgent reader.

 Spinifex and sand.

 I will sing you a lay of W.A. 
 Of a wanderer, travelled and tanned
 By the sun’s fierce ray, through the livelong day
 In the Spinifex and Sand.

 At the day’s first dawn, in earliest morn,
 As a soldier obeys a command,
 From his blanket he’s torn, still weary and worn,
 By the Spinifex and Sand.

 Unrested still, he must put on the billy,
 And eat of the meat that is canned,
 He must take his full fill, he must face willy-nilly
 The Spinifex and the Sand.

 Then he gets on the tracks and sights the arched backs
 Of his camels of true South Aus. brand,
 And with saddle and sack he must hasten to pack
 For the Spinifex and Sand.

 From the start until night, till he’s sick of the sight,
 There seem to dance hand in hand
 A lady so bright, and a green-armoured knight,
 The Spinifex and the Sand.

 He turns to his mate with “It gets a bit late,”
 His mate, he just answers offhand—­
 “It’s the same soon or late, we’ll camp ’t any rate
 In the Spinifex and Sand.”

 As the night drags along, a weird-looking throng
 Fills his dreams of a far-off land,
 And a voice loud and strong chants the same ceaseless song,
 Of the spinifex and the sand.

Since this is one of the few attempts at rhyming that I have been guilty of, I hope I may be excused for wishing to see it in print, for at the time I was exceedingly proud of the composition.  Ah! well, it served to pass the time and afforded some amusement.  Soon we had other matters to think about, for on the 12th we found ourselves on the outskirts of auriferous country and were lucky in reaching plenty of water.  Being lightly loaded we had made good marches, covering 103 miles from the last water on May 8th, an average of twenty and a half miles per day.

From the 13th to the 21st we camped surrounded by hills, any one of which might contain gold if only we could find it.  Unremitting labours resulted in nothing but a few colours here and there.  We were now thirty miles to the North-West of Mount Margaret (discovered and named by Forrest in 1869, who on that journey reached a point some sixty miles further East than that hill), and though we were the first, so far as I know, to prospect this particular part of the district, it was reserved for subsequent fossickers to find anything worth having.