We carried some water in a keg for ourselves, but the horses got none.  The country passed over to-day was mostly red sandhills, recently burnt, and on that account free from spinifex.  We travelled about north, 40 degrees east.  We next steered away for a dark-looking, bluff-ending hill, nearly north-north-east.  Before arriving at it we searched among a lot of pine-clad hills for water without effect, reaching the hill in twenty-two miles.  Resting our horses, we ascended the hill; from it I discovered, with glasses, that to the north and round easterly and westerly a number of ranges lay at a very considerable distance.  The nearest, which lay north, was evidently sixty or seventy miles off.  These ranges appeared to be of some length, but were not sufficiently raised above the ocean of scrubs, which occupied the intervening spaces, and rose into high and higher undulations, to allow me to form an opinion with regard to their altitude.  Those east of north appeared higher and farther away, and were bolder and more pointed in outline.  None of them were seen with the naked eye at first, but, when once seen with the field-glasses, the mind’s eye would always represent them to us, floating and faintly waving apparently skywards in their vague and distant mirage.  This discovery instantly created a burning desire in both of us to be off and reach them; but there were one or two preliminary determinations to be considered before starting.  We are now nearly fifty miles from Fort Mueller, and the horses have been all one day, all one night, and half to-day without water.  There might certainly be water at the new ranges, but then again there might not, and although they were at least sixty miles off, our horses might easily reach them.  If, however, no water were found, they and perhaps we could never return.  My reader must not confound a hundred miles’ walk in this region with the same distance in any other.  The greatest walker that ever stepped would find more than his match here.  In the first place the feet sink in the loose and sandy soil, in the second it is densely covered with the hideous porcupine; to avoid the constant prickings from this the walker is compelled to raise his feet to an unnatural height; and another hideous vegetation, which I call sage-bush, obstructs even more, although it does not pain so much as the irritans.  Again, the ground being hot enough to burn the soles off one’s boots, with the thermometer at something like 180 degrees in the sun, and the choking from thirst at every movement of the body, is enough to make any one pause before he foolishly gets himself into such a predicament.  Discretion in such a case is by far the better part of valour—­for valour wasted upon burning sands to no purpose is like love’s labour lost.

Close about in all directions, except north, were broken masses of hills, and we decided to search among them for a new point of departure.  We re-saddled our horses, and searched those nearest, that is to say easterly; but no water was found, nor any place that could hold it for an hour after it fell from the sky.  Then we went north-west, to a bare-looking hill, and others with pines ornamenting their tops; but after travelling and searching all day, and the horses doing forty-six miles, we had to camp again without water.