We had now no object but to keep pushing on; our supply of water was all but gone, and we were in the last stage of thirst and wretchedness.  By the night of that day we had reached a place 168 miles from Wynbring, and in all that distance not a drop of water had been found.  We had one unfortunate horse left, the grey called Formby, and that poor creature held out as long and on as little water as I am sure is possible in such a heated and horrid region.  On the following morning the poor beast came up to Nicholls and I, old Jimmy being after the camels which were close by, and began to smell us, then stood gazing vacantly at the fire; a thought seemed to strike him that it was water, and he put his mouth down into the flames.  This idea seems to actuate all animals when in the last stage of thirst.  We were choking with thirst ourselves, but we agreed to sacrifice a small billyful of our remaining stock of water for this unfortunate last victim to our enterprise.  We gave him about two quarts, and bitterly we regretted it later, hoping he might still be able to stagger on to where water might be found; but vain was the hope and vain the gift, for the creature that had held up so long and so well, swallowed up the last little draught we gave, fell down and rolled and shivered in agony, as Chester had done, and he died and was at rest.  A singular thing about this horse was that his eyes had sunk into his head until they were all but hidden.  For my own part, in such a region and in such a predicament as we were placed, I would not unwillingly have followed him into the future.

The celebrated Sir Thomas Mitchell, one of Australia’s early explorers, in one of his journeys, after finding a magnificent country watered by large rivers, and now the long-settled abodes of civilisation, mounted on a splendid horse, bursts into an old cavalier song, a verse of which says: 

   “A steede, a steede of matchless speede,
    A sworde of metal keane;
    All else to noble mindes is drosse;
    All else on earthe is meane.”

I don’t know what he would have thought had he been in my case, with his matchless “steede” dead, and in the pangs of thirst himself, his “sworde of metal keane” a useless encumbrance, 168 miles from the last water, and not knowing where the next might be; he would have to admit that the wonderful beasts which now alone remained to us were by no means to be accounted “meane,” for these patient and enduring creatures, which were still alive, had tasted no water since leaving Wynbring, and, though the horses were dead and gone, stood up with undiminished powers—­appearing to be as well able now to continue on and traverse this wide-spread desert as when they left the last oasis behind.  We had nothing now to depend upon but our two “ships of the desert,” which we were only just beginning to understand.  I had been a firm believer in them from the first, and had many an argument with Nicholls about them; his opinion had now entirely altered.  At Youldeh he had called them ugly, useless, lazy brutes, that were not to be compared to horses for a moment; but now that the horses were dead they seemed more agreeable and companionable than ever the horses had been.