August 19.—­After wandering about the whole day without gaining any thing on our course, for the quicksands kept us revolving as it were in a circle, the exhaustion of the horses obliged us to stop.  It was painful to behold them, after being disencumbered of their loads, lay themselves down like dogs about us:  it was the fourth day that they had been without grass, and they preferred the tender branches of shrubs, etc., to the prickly grass.  The backs of the greater part of them were, notwithstanding every care, dreadfully galled, so that they could, when first saddled, scarcely stand under their burdens.  These quicksands lie in the hollows between the low irregular hills, which rise on this otherwise level country:  their point of discharge is uniformly north-westerly.  The union of many of these minor drains forms occasionally a large one, and the points of the hills which meet upon them afford the only means of crossing them.  It was evident that the early part of the winter had been very wet., and the late rains had probably been the cause of these morasses, which still continued to drain themselves off in running water.  This region must at all times be impassable from opposite causes:  in wet seasons it is a bog; in dry ones, there is no water.  Finding, as above remarked, that northerly and north-east the country declined as it were to nothing, it was resolved to pursue a more easterly course than that hitherto followed; and instead of attempting to go round the morasses which we might meet with to the north, to follow them southerly, a course which in time must certainly take us to a more elevated country.  Such a road is rendered now absolutely necessary by the condition of the horses.  Our dogs, which had so long contributed to our support, had been for the last four days dependant upon us for theirs, and we were too much indebted to their exertions not to share our meals with them with cheerfulness.  These woods abound with kangaroo rats, and it is singular that, pinched as the dogs were, they would not touch them even when cooked.

August 20.—­This day after travelling upwards of nine miles, and having pushed the horses at the risk of their lives through two minor branches of the bog, what was our mortification to find, that we were within a few hundred yards of the spot we set out from!  We had first attempted to cross the main bog northerly, and afterwards kept along its edge southerly; and the result was, that we found it to extend in a complete circle around us.  From a slight rise in the centre of it, we could see the country to the north-east, north, and north-west, low and uneven; Hardwicke’s Range distant about forty miles, bounding it between the north and east.  The result of this day’s exertion quite subdued our fortitude, and for a moment a feeling nearly allied to despair had possession of our minds.  We knew not which way to turn ourselves.  To return to Arbuthnot’s Range, and again undergo what it