and protect it from being moved by the wind, and makes a good mattress when dug up and turned over.  I should advise no one to try and sleep on the plant as it grows, for “He who sitteth on a thistle riseth up quickly.”  But the thistle has one advantage, viz., that it does not leave its points in its victim’s flesh.  In Northern Australia spinifex is in seed for three weeks, and when in this state, forms most excellent feed for horses, and fattens almost as quickly as oats; for the rest of the year it is useless.

I can imagine any one, on being suddenly placed on rising ground with a vast plain of waving spinifex spreading before him—­a plain relieved occasionally by the stately desert oak, solemn, white, and mysterious—­saying, “Ah! what a charming view—­how beautiful that rolling plain of grass! its level surface broken by that bold sandhill, fiery-red in the blaze of sun!” But when day after day, week after week, and month after month must be passed always surrounded by the hateful plant, one’s sense of the picturesque becomes sadly blunted.

This was our first introduction to the desert and, though a little monotonous, it seemed quite pleasant, and indeed was so, when compared to the heartrending country met with later in our journey.

The sand has been formed (blown, I suppose) into irregular ridges, running more or less parallel, but in no one fixed direction.  From the edge of the desert to Mount Worsnop, a distance of nearly two hundred miles in a straight line, the country presented the same appearance.  First a belt, eight to ten miles wide, of sand-ridges from thirty to fifty feet high, with a general direction of E. by S. and W. by N.; then a broad sand-flat of equal breadth, either timbered with desert gums, or open and covered with spinifex breast-high, looking in the distance like a field of ripe corn; next another series of ridges with a S.E. and N.W. direction; then, with startling suddenness, a small oasis, enclosed or nearly surrounded by sheer broken cliffs of desert sandstone, from which little creeks run out into the sand, winding their way for a mile or two between the ridges.  Dry watercourses these, except immediately after rain; in their beds are found native wells five to ten feet in depth, sometimes holding water; on their banks, round the foot of the cliffs, and on the flat where the creeks merge into the sand, grows long grass—­kangaroo-grass—­and, in the winter magnificent herbage.  Next we find a dense thicket, and, this passed, we come again to open plains.  And thus sand-ridges now E. and W., now S.E. and N.W., now S.W. and N.E. (as in the vicinity of Empress Spring), and now sandhills heaped up without regularity, alternate with mulga thickets, open plains of spinifex, and flat, timbered country.  The most noticeable vegetation is of course spinifex; as well as that, however, are several shrubs which form good camel feed, such as acacia SALICINA, with its pretty, scented flower like a little golden