We next travelled over a fine hard plain covered very generally with small bushes of a beautiful orange-flowered, spreading under-shrub, with broad thin-winged fruit;* but the Mesembryanthemum aequilaterale grew almost everywhere and seemed to take the place of grass.  It crept over the light red earth, ornamenting it with a rich variety of bright green, light red, purple, and scarlet tints which, when contrasted with the dead portions that were all of a pale grey colour, produced a fine harmonious foreground, fit for any landscape.  The plains were intersected by a small wood of goborro (dwarf box) and after crossing this and keeping the lofty yarra trees in view we found these trees at length growing on ground which was intersected by hollows full of reeds, other parts of the surface bearing a green crop of grass.

(Footnote.  Ropera aurantiaca, Lindley manuscripts; foliolis linearibus obtusis succulentis petiolo aequalibus, petalis obovatis obtusissimis, fructibus orbiculatis.  November 1838:  This Ropera has grown in the gardens of the Horticultural Society at Chiswick and proves a pretty new annual flower.)

IMPROVED APPEARANCE OF THE RIVER.

The banks of the river bore here a very different aspect from any parts which we had seen above; and I supposed that we were at length approaching its junction with the Murrumbidgee.  The bed was broader but not so deep, and contained abundance of water at every turning.  Ducks, pigeons, cockatoos and parrots were numerous; and we had certainly reached a better country than any we had yet traversed.

INHABITED TOMB.

On a corner of the plain, just as we approached the land of reedy hollows, I perceived at some distance a large, lonely hut of peculiar construction, and I accordingly rode to examine it.  On approaching it I observed that it was closed on every side, the materials consisting of poles and large sheets of bark, and that it stood in the centre of a plot of bare earth of considerable extent, but enclosed by three small ridges, the surface within the area having been made very level and smooth.  I had little doubt that this was a tomb but, on looking through a crevice, I perceived that the floor was covered with a bed of rushes which had been recently occupied.  On removing a piece of bark and lifting the rushes, I ascertained, on thrusting my sabre into the hollow loose earth under them, that this bed covered a grave.

Tommy Came-first, who was with me, pronounced this to be the work of a white man; but by the time I had finished a sketch of it The Widow had hailed him from the woods and told him that it was a grave, after which I could not prevail on him to approach the spot.  I carefully replaced the bark, anxious that no disturbance of the repose of the dead should accompany the prints of the white man’s feet.  I afterwards learnt from The Widow that the rushes within that solitary tomb were actually the nightly bed of some near relative