other travellers in South and Central Australia.  This expedition, however, though provided with a large caravan of fifty-four camels, accomplished less than its predecessors.  Leaving Forrest’s route at Mount Squires, Lindsay marched his caravan across the Queen Victoria Desert to Queen Victoria Spring, a distance of some 350 miles, without finding water except in small quantities in rock-holes on the low sandstone cliffs he occasionally met with.  From Queen Victoria Spring, he made down to Esperance Bay, and thence by the Hampton Plains, through settled country to the Murchison.  Here Lindsay left the expedition and returned to Adelaide; Wells, surveyor to the party, meanwhile making a flying trip to the eastward as far as the centre of the Colony and then back again.  During this trip he accomplished much useful work, discovering considerable extents of auriferous country now dotted with mining camps and towns.  On reaching the coast, he found orders to return to Adelaide, as the expedition had come to an end.  Why, it was never generally known.  Thus there still remained a vast unknown expanse right in the heart of the interior covering 150,000 square miles, bounded on the North by Warburton’s Great Sandy Desert, on the South by Giles’s Desert of Gravel (Gibson’s Desert), on the West by the strip of well-watered country between the coast and the highland in which the rivers rise, on the East by nothing but the imaginary boundary-line between West and South Australia, and beyond by the Adelaide to Port Darwin Telegraph Line.

To penetrate into this great unknown it would be necessary first to pass over the inhospitable regions described by Wells, Forrest, and Giles, and the unmapped expanses between their several routes—­crossing their tracks almost at right angles, and deriving no benefit from their experiences except a comparison in positions on the chart, should the point of intersection occur at any recognisable feature, such as a noticeable hill or lake.

Should the unexplored part between Giles’s and Warburton’s routes be successfully crossed, there still would remain an unexplored tract 150 miles broad by 450 long before the settlements in Kimberley could be reached, 1,000 miles in a bee-line from Coolgardie.  This was the expedition I had mapped out for my undertaking, and now after four years’ hard struggle I had at length amassed sufficient means to carry it through.  I do not wish to pose as a hero who risked the perils and dangers of the desert in the cause of science, any more than I would wish it to be thought that I had no more noble idea than the finding of gold.  Indeed, one cannot tell one’s own motives sometimes; in my case, however, I believe an insatiable curiosity to “know what was there,” joined to a desire to be doing something useful to my fellow-men, was my chief incentive.  I had an idea that a mountain range similar to, but of course of less extent, than the McDonnell Ranges in Central Australia might be found—­an idea based on the fact that the vast swamps or salt-lakes, Lake Amadeus and Lake Macdonald, which apparently have no creeks to feed them from the East, must necessarily be filled from somewhere.  Since it was not from the East, why not from the West?