two camels, the calf running loose.  We all rode horses, and had several pack-horses to carry our provisions and camp necessaries.  The weather was exceedingly hot, although the previous summer months had been reasonably cool, the heat having been tempered by southerly sea breezes.  Nature now seemed to intend to concentrate all the usual heat of an Australian summer into the two remaining months that were left to her.  The thermometer usually stood for several hours of each day at 104, 105, and 106 degrees in the shade.

After leaving Colona, an out sheep station belonging to Fowler’s Bay, lying some thirty-five miles north-west from it, and where Mr. Murray resided, we traversed a country alternating between belts of scrub and grassy flats or small plains, until at twenty miles from Colona we reached the edge of a plain that stretched away to the north, and was evidently of a very great extent.  The soil was loose and yielding, and of a very poor quality.  Although this plain was covered with vegetation, there was no grass whatever upon it; but a growth of a kind of broom, two to three feet high, waving in the heated breezes as far as the eye could reach, which gave it a billowy and extraordinary appearance.  The botanical name of this plant is Eremophila scoparia.

At fifty miles from Colona and eighty-five from the bay, we reached a salt lagoon, which, though several miles long, and perhaps a mile wide, Mr. Murray’s black boy informed us was the footmark or track of a monstrous animal or snake, that used to haunt the neighbourhood of this big plain, and that it had been driven by the Cockata blacks out of the mountains to the north, the Musgrave Ranges of my last expedition, and which are over 400 miles from the bay.  He added that the creature had crawled down to the coast, and now lived in the sea.  So here was reliable authority for the existence of a sea serpent.  We had often heard tales from the blacks, when sitting round our camp fires at night, about this wonderful animal, and whenever any native spoke about it, it was always in a mysterious undertone.  What the name of this monster was, I cannot now remember; but there were syllables enough in it to make a word as long as the lagoon itself.  The tales that were told of it, the number of natives it had devoured, how such and such a black fellow’s father had encountered and speared it, and how it had occasionally created floods all over the country when it was angry, would have made an excellent novel, which might be produced under the title of a “Black Romance.”  When we laughed at, or joked this young black fellow who now accompanied us, on the absurdity of his notions, he became very serious, for to him and his co-religionists it was no laughing matter.  Another thing was rather strange, and that was, how these coast natives should know there were any mountains to the north of them.  I knew it, because I had been there and found them; but that they should know it was curious, for they have no intercourse with the tribes of natives in the country to the north of them; indeed it required a good deal of persuasion to induce the young blacks who accompanied us to go out to Youldeh; and if it had not been that an old man called Jimmy had been induced by Mr. Richards to go with the camels in advance, I am quite sure the young ones would not have gone at all.