The country we passed through to-day was entirely scrubs, except where the salt basins intervened, and nothing but scrubs could be seen ahead, or indeed in any other direction.  The latitude of the camp on this lake was 29 degrees 24’ 8”, and it was twenty-two miles from the dam.  We continued our march and proceeded still upon the same course, still under our usual routine of steering.  By the fifth night of our travels we had met no water or any places that could hold it, and apparently we had left all the salt basins behind.  Up to this point we had been continually in dense scrubs, but here the country became a little more open; myal timber, acacia, generally took the places of the mallee and the casuarinas; the spinifex disappeared, and real grass grew in its place.  I was in hopes of finding water if we should debouch upon a plain, or perhaps discover some ranges or hills which the scrubs might have hidden from us.  On the sixth day of our march we entered fairly on a plain, the country being very well grassed.  It also had several kinds of salsolaceous bushes upon it; these furnish excellent fodder plants for all herbivorous animals.  Although the soil was not very good, being sand mixed with clay, it was a very hard and good travelling country; the camels’ feet left scarcely any impression on it, and only by the flattened grass and crushed plants trodden to earth by our heavy-weighing ships, could our trail now be followed.  The plain appeared to extend a great distance all around us.  A solemn stillness pervaded the atmosphere; nobody spoke much above a whisper.  Once we saw some wild turkey bustards, and Mr. Young managed to wing one of them on the seventh day from the dam.  On the seventh night the cow, for which we had delayed there, calved, but her bull-calf had to be destroyed, as we could not delay for it on the march.  The old cow was in very good condition, went off her milk in a day or two, and continued on the journey as though nothing had occurred.  On the eighth we had cold fowl for breakfast, with a modicum of water.  On the ninth and tenth days of our march the plains continued, and I began to think we were more liable to die for want of water on them than in the dense and hideous scrubs we had been so anxious to leave behind.  Although the region now was all a plain, no views of any extent could be obtained, as the country still rolled on in endless undulations at various distances apart, just as in the scrubs.  It was evident that the regions we were traversing were utterly waterless, and in all the distance we had come in ten days, no spot had been found where water could lodge.  It was totally uninhabited by either man or animal, not a track of a single marsupial, emu, or wild dog was to be seen, and we seemed to have penetrated into a region utterly unknown to man, and as utterly forsaken by God.  We had now come 190 miles from water, and our prospects of obtaining any appeared more and more hopeless.  Vainly indeed it seemed that I might say—­with