“You will be glad to hear, and so ought every body, that we have maintained a most satisfactory intercourse with the natives.  The report we had heard referred to Major Mitchell’s affray with them, and you will not be surprised at their reverting to it, when I tell you that several old men immediately recognized me as having gone down the Murray in a boat, although they could have seen me for an hour or two only, and fifteen years have now elapsed since I went down the river.  I suppose we misunderstood the story; but most assuredly I fully anticipated we should, sooner or later, come on some dreadful acene or other, and I came up fully prepared to act; but the natives have been exceedingly quiet, nor have we seen a weapon in the hands of any of them:  in truth I have been quite astonished at the change in the blacks; for instead of collecting in a body, they have visited us with their wives and children, and have behaved in the most quiet manner.  We may attribute this in part to our own treatment of the natives, and in part to Eyre’s influence over them, which is very extensive, and has been productive of great good.  The account the natives give of the distant interior is very discouraging.  It is nothing more however than what I expected.  They say that beyond the hills it is all sand and rocks; that there is neither grass or water, or wood; and that it is awfully hot.  This last feature appears to terrify them.  They say that they are obliged to take wood to the hills for fire, and that they clamber up the rocks on the hills; that when there is water there, it is in deep holes from which they are obliged to sponge it up and squeeze it out to drink.  I do not in truth think that any of the natives have been beyond the hills, and that the country is perfectly impracticable.

“We are now not more than two hundred and fifteen feet above the sea, with a declining country to the north-west, and the general dip of the continent to the south-west.  What is the natural inference where there is not a single river emptying itself upon the coast, but that there is an internal basin?  Such a country can only be penetrated by cool calculation and determined perseverance.  I have sat down before it as a besieger before a fortress, to make my approaches with the same systematic regularity.  I must cut hay and send forage and water in advance, as far as I can.  I have the means of taking sixteen days’ water and feed for two horses and three men; and if I can throw my supplies one hundred miles in advance, I shall be able to go two hundred miles more beyond that point, at the rate of thirty miles a-day, one of us walking whilst two rode.  Surely at such a distance some new feature will open to reward our efforts!  My own opinion is, that an inland sea will bring us up ere long—­then how shall we get the boat upon it?  ‘Why,’ you will say, ‘necessity is the mother of invention.’  You will find some means or other, no doubt; and so we will.  However, under any circumstances, depend upon it I will either lift up or tear down the curtain which hides the interior from us, so look out for the next accounts from me as of the most interesting kind, as solving this great problem, or shutting the door to discovery from this side the continent for ever.