A valley led away from here, along the foot of the northern hills, almost west.  At five miles we crossed the channel of a fine little creek, coming from thence; it had several sheets of water with rocky banks, and there were numerous ducks on the waters.  The timber upon this creek was mostly blood-wood or red gum; the blood-wood has now almost entirely supplanted the other eucalypts.  There was another tree of a very peculiar leaf which I have often met before, but only as a bush; here it had assumed the proportions of a tree.  This was one of the desert acacias, but which of them I could not tell.  Farther on were several bare red hills, festooned with cypress pines, which always give a most pleasing tone to any Australian view.  These I called Harriet’s Springs.  The creek meandered away down the valley amongst pine-clad hills to the south-westward, and appeared to increase in size below where we crossed it.

I ascended a hill and saw that the two lines of hills encircling the Champ de Mars had now entirely separated, the space between becoming gradually broader.

A pointed hill at the far end of the southern line bore west, and we started away for it.  We continued on this west course for fifteen or sixteen miles, having the southern hills very close to our line of march.  Having travelled some twenty miles, I turned up a blind gully or water-channel in a small triodia valley, and found some water lying about amongst the grass.  The herbage here was splendid.  Ants and burrs were very annoying, however; we have been afflicted with both of these animal and vegetable annoyances upon many occasions all through these regions.  There was a high, black-looking mountain with a conical summit, in the northern line of ranges, which bore north-westward from here.  I named it Mount Aloysius, after the Christian name of Sir A.F.  Weld, Governor of Western Australia.  We had entered the territory of the Colony of Western Australia on the last day of September; the boundary between it and South Australia being the 129th meridian of east longitude.  The latitude by stars of this camp was 26 degrees 9’.  Leaving it early, we continued upon the same line as yesterday, and towards the same hill, which we reached in five miles, and ascended.  It was nearly the most westerly point of the line of hills we had been following.  The summit of this hill I found to consist of great masses of rifted stone, which were either solid iron or stone coated thickly with it.  The blocks rang with the sound of my iron-shod boots, while moving over them, with such a musical intonation and bell-like clang, that I called this the Bell Rock.  Mount Aloysius bore north 9 degrees west, distant about ten miles; here I saw it was quite an isolated range, as, at its eastern and western extremities, open spaces could be seen between it and any other hills.

CHAPTER 2.4.  FROM 30TH SEPTEMBER TO 9TH NOVEMBER, 1873.