The return journey to Mount Harris continued without interruption.  At Mount Harris they expected to find fresh supplies; but as they approached the place they could not restrain fears with regard to their safety.  The surrounding reed beds were in flames in all parts.  The few natives that were met with displayed a guilty timidity, and one was observed wearing a jacket.  Fortunately, however, their fears were groundless; the relief party had arrived and had been awaiting their return for about three weeks.  An attack by the natives had been made, but it had been easily repulsed.  While Sturt rested at Mount Harris, Hume struck off to the west, beyond the reeds.  He reported the country as superior for thirty miles to any they had yet seen, but beyond that limit lay brushwood and monotonous plains.

On the 7th of March the party struck camp and departed for the Castlereagh River.  They found that the flooded stream, impassable by Oxley, had totally disappeared.  Not a drop of water lay in the bed of the river.  They commenced to follow its course down, and the old harassing hunt for water had to be conducted anew.  No wonder that Sturt could never free himself from the memory of his fiery baptism as Australian explorer, and that his mental picture of the country was ever shrouded in the haze of drought and heat.

As they descended the Castlereagh into the level lower country, they were greatly delayed by the many intricate windings of the river and its multiplicity of channels.  On the 29th of March they again reached the Darling, ninety miles above the place where they had first come upon it, and they observed the same characteristics as before, including the saltness.  This was a blow to Sturt, who had hoped to find it free from salinity.  Fortunately they were not distressed for fresh water at the time, and knowing what to expect if the river was followed down again, the party halted and formed a camp.

The next day Sturt, Hume, and two men crossed the river and made a short journey of investigation to the west, to see what fortune held for them further afield.  Not having passed during the day “a drop of water or a blade of grass,” they found themselves by mid-afternoon on a wide plain that stretched far away to the horizon.  Sturt writes that had there been the slightest encouragement afforded by any change in the country, he would even then have pushed forward, “but we had left all traces of the natives behind us, and this seemed a desert they never entered —­ that not even a bird inhabited.”

Back to Mount Harris once more, where they arrived on the 7th of April, 1829.  On their way they had stopped to follow a depression first noticed by Hume, and decided that it was the channel of the overflow of the Macquarie Marshes.

6.3.  The passage of the Murray.

The mystery of the Macquarie was now, to a certain extent, cleared away, but the course and final outlet of the Darling now presented another riddle, which Sturt too was destined to solve.