We started for the flat-topped hill on the 11th of June.  The country was all extremely heavy sandhills, with casuarina and triodia; we had to encamp among them at twenty-three miles, without water.  The next morning Formby knocked up, and lay down, and we had to leave him in the scrub.  To-day we got over thirty miles, the hill being yet seven or eight miles off.  It looks most repulsive, so far as any likelihoods of obtaining water is concerned.  The region was a perfect desert, worse for travelling, indeed, than Gibson’s Desert itself.  Leaving Jimmy with the horses, Mr. Tietkens and I rode over to the mount, and reached it in seven miles.  At a mile and a half from it we came to an outer escarpment of rocks; but between that and the mount more sandhills and thick scrub exist.  We rode all round this strange feature; it was many hundreds of feet high, and for half its height its sides sloped; the crown rested upon a perpendicular wall.  It was almost circular, and perfectly flat upon the top, apparently having the same kind of vegetation and timber upon its summit as that upon the ground below.  I don’t know that it is accessible; it seemed not; I saw no place, and did not attempt to ascend it.

To the north, and about fifteen miles away, the not yet ended Amadeus Lake was visible.  To the east timbered ridges bounded the view.  There were a few dry clay-pans here, but no water.  We were sixty miles from the rock, and to all appearance we might have to go sixty, or a hundred, or more miles before we should reach water.  The only water I knew on this line of latitude was at the Finke itself, nearly 200 miles away.

We must return to our Rock of Ages, for we must smoke another horse, and we have no water to push any farther here.  We returned to Jimmy and the horses, and pushed back for the rock as fast as we could.  When we reached the spot where we had left Formby he had wandered away.  We went some distance on his tracks, but could not delay for a further search.  No doubt he had lain down and died not far off.  I was sorry now I had not smoked him before we started, though he was scarcely fit even for explorers’ food.  We got back to the rock on the 15th, very late at night, hungry and thirsty.  The next day we worked at a new smoke-house, and had to shift the camp to it, so as to be near, to keep a perpetual cloud rising, till the meat is safe.  The smoke-house is formed of four main stakes stuck into the ground and coming nearly together at the top, with cross sticks all the way down, and covered over with tarpaulins, so that no smoke can escape except through the top.  The meat is cut into thin strips, and becomes perfectly permeated with smoke.  So soon as all was ready, down went poor Hollow Back.  He was in what is called good working condition, but he had not a vestige of fat about him.  The only adipose matter we could obtain from him was by boiling his bones, and the small quantity of oil thus obtained would only fry