travelled at least 120 miles eastward from Youldeh, and when there, this old fellow had told us that he had not visited any of the places he was going to take me to since his boyhood; this at the very least must have been forty years ago, for he was certainly fifty, if not seventy, years old.  The knowledge possessed by these children of the desert is preserved owing to the fact that their imaginations are untrammelled, the denizens of the wilderness, having their mental faculties put to but few uses, and all are concentrated on the object of obtaining food for themselves and their offspring.  Whatever ideas they possess, and they are by no means dull or backward in learning new ones, are ever keen and young, and Nature has endowed them with an undying mental youth, until their career on earth is ended.  As says a poet, speaking of savages or men in a state of nature:—­

   “There the passions may revel unfettered,
    And the heart never speak but in truth;
    And the intellect, wholly unlettered,
    Be bright with the freedom of youth.”

Assuredly man in a savage state, is by no means the unhappiest of mortals.  Old Jimmy’s faculties of memory were put to the test several times during the eight days we were travelling from Youldeh to this rock.  Sometimes when leading us through the scrubs, and having travelled for some miles nearly east, he would notice a tree or a sandhill, or something that he remembered, and would turn suddenly from that point in an entirely different direction, towards some high and severe sandhill; here he would climb a tree.  After a few minutes’ gazing about, he would descend, mount his horse, and go off on some new line, and in the course of a mile or so he would stop at a tree, and tell us that when a little boy he got a ’possum out of a hole which existed in it.  At another place he said his mother was bitten by a wild dog, which she was digging out of a hole in the ground; and thus we came to Wynbring at last.

A conspicuous mountain—­indeed the only object upon which the eye could rest above the dense scrubs that surrounded us—­bore south 52 degrees east from this rock, and I supposed it was Mount Finke.  Our advent disturbed a number of natives; their fresh footprints were everywhere about the place, and our guide not being at ease in his mind as to what sort of reception he might get from the owners of this demesne, told me if I would let him have a gun, he would go and hunt them up, and try to induce some of them to come to the camp.  The old chap had but limited experience of firearms, so I gave him an unloaded gun, as he might have shot himself, or any other of the natives, without intending to do any harm.  Away he went, and returned with five captives, an antiquated one-eyed old gentleman, with his three wives, and one baby belonging to the second wife, who had been a woman of considerable beauty.  She was now rather past her prime.  What the oldest wife could ever have been like, it