ITS BREADTH AT OUR CAMP.  DESCRIPTION OF ITS BANKS.

This magnificent stream was 165 yards broad, its waters were whitish, as if tinged with some flood; the height of the red bank, not subject to inundation, was 25 feet and by comparing these measurements with the Murrumbidgee, which at Weyeba was 50 yards wide, with banks 11 feet high (and that seemed a fine river) some idea may be formed of the Murray.* At the place where we encamped the river had no bergs, for its bank consisted of the common red earth covered with the acacia bushes and scrub of the interior plains.  The land at the point opposite was lower and sandy, and a slight rapid was occasioned in the stream by a ridge of ironstone.

(Footnote.  See comparative sections of these and other rivers to one scale on the General Map in Volume 1.)

May 24.

It was quite impossible to say on what part of the Murray, as laid down by Captain Sturt, we had arrived; and we were therefore obliged to feel our way just as cautiously as if we had been upon a river unexplored.  The ground was indeed a tolerable guide, especially after we found that this river also had bergs which marked the line of separation between the desert plain or scrub and the good grassy forest-land of which the river-margin consisted.  As we proceeded I found it best to keep along the bergs as much as possible in order to avoid ana-branches* of the river.  Where the bergs receded forest land with the goborro or dwarf-box intervened.  In travelling over ground of this description we crossed, at two miles from the camp, a dry creek or branch, and another at a mile and a quarter further.

(Footnote.  Having experienced on this journey the inconvenient want of terms relative to rivers I determined to use such of those recommended by Colonel Jackson in his able paper on the subject, in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society for 1833, as I might find necessary.  They are these:  Tributary:  Any stream adding to the main trunk.  Ana-branches:  Such as after separation unite.  Berg, bergs:  Heights now at some distance, once the immediate banks of a river or lake.  Bank:  That part washed by the existing stream.  Border:  The vegetation at the water’s edge, forest trees, or quays of granite, etc.  Brink:  The water’s edge.  Margin:  The space between the brinks and the bergs.)

MEET WITH A TRIBE.

Soon after we entered a small plain bounded on the west by another dry channel, and beyond this we were prevented from continuing in the direction in which I wished to travel by a creek full of water, obliging us to turn northward and eastward of north until I at length found a crossing-place, and just as we perceived smoke at some distance beyond the other bank.  To this smoke Piper had hastened, and when I reached a plain beyond the creek I saw him carrying on a flying conversation with an old man and several gins who were retiring in a north-west direction to a wood about a mile distant.