The nights were now agreeably cool, sometimes very dewy.  The lame horse was still very bad, but we lightened his load, and after the first mile he travelled pretty well.  We steered for the singular cone in advance.  Most of the hills, however, of the Anthony Range were flat-topped, though many tent-shaped ones exist also.  I ascended the cone in ten miles, west of north-west from camp.  The view displayed hills for miles in all directions, amongst which were many bare rocks of red colour heaped into the most fantastically tossed mounds imaginable, with here and there an odd shrub growing from the interstices of the rocks; some small miniature creeks, with only myal and mulga growing in them, ran through the valleys—­all of these had recently been running.  We camped a mile or two beyond the cone in an extremely pretty and romantic valley; the grass was green, and Nature appeared in one of her smiling moods, throwing a gleam of sunshine on the minds of the adventurers who had sought her in one of her wilderness recesses.  The only miserable creature in our party was the lame horse, but now indeed he had a mate in misfortune, for we found that another horse, Giant Despair, had staked himself during our day’s march, though he did not appear lame until we stopped, and his hobbles were about to be put on.  Mr. Tietkens extracted a long mulga stick from his fetlock:  neither of the two staked horses ever became sound again, although they worked well enough.  In the night, or rather by morning (daylight), the thermometer had fallen to 30 degrees, and though there was a heavy dew there was neither frost nor ice.

We now passed up to the head of the picturesque valley, and from there wound round some of the mounds of bare rocks previously mentioned.  They are composed of a kind of a red conglomerate granite.  We turned in and out amongst the hills till we arrived at the banks of a small creek lined with eucalyptus or gum-trees, and finding some water we encamped on a piece of beautiful-looking country, splendidly grassed and ornamented with the fantastic mounds, and the creek timber as back and fore grounds for the picture.  Small birds twittered on each bough, sang their little songs of love or hate, and gleefully fled or pursued each other from tree to tree.  The atmosphere seemed cleared of all grossness or impurities, a few sunlit clouds floated in space, and a perfume from Nature’s own laboratory was exhaled from the flowers and vegetation around.  It might well be said that here were

   “Gusts of fragrance on the grasses,
    In the skies a softened splendour;
    Through the copse and woodland passes
    Songs of birds in cadence tender.”