pillar is nearly all mulga, a very hard acacia, though a few tall and well-grown casuarinas—­of a kind that is new to me, namely the C. Decaisneana—­are occasionally met. (These trees have almost a palm-like appearance, and look like huge mops; but they grow in the driest regions.) On our route Mr. Carmichael brought to me a most peculiar little lizard, a true native of the soil; its colour was a yellowish-green; it was armed, or ornamented, at points and joints, with spines, in a row along its back, sides, and legs; these were curved, and almost sharp; on the back of its neck was a thick knotty lump, with a spine at each side, by which I lifted it; its tail was armed with spines to the point, and was of proportional length to its body.  The lizard was about eight inches in length.  Naturalists have christened this harmless little chameleon the Moloch horridus.  I put the little creature in a pouch, and intended to preserve it, but it managed to crawl out of its receptacle, and dropped again to its native sand.  I had one of these lizards, as a pet, for months in Melbourne.  It was finally trodden on and died.  It used to eat sugar.

By this time we were close to the pillar:  its outline was most imposing.  Upon reaching it, I found it to be a columnar structure, standing upon a pedestal, which is perhaps eighty feet high, and composed of loose white sandstone, having vast numbers of large blocks lying about in all directions.  From the centre of the pedestal rises the pillar, composed also of the same kind of rock; at its top, and for twenty to thirty feet from its summit, the colour of the stone is red.  The column itself must be seventy or eighty feet above the pedestal.  It is split at the top into two points.  There it stands, a vast monument of the geological periods that must have elapsed since the mountain ridge, of which it was formerly a part, was washed by the action of old Ocean’s waves into mere sandhills at its feet.  The stone is so friable that names can be cut in it to almost any depth with a pocket-knife:  so loose, indeed, is it, that one almost feels alarmed lest it should fall while he is scratching at its base.  In a small orifice or chamber of the pillar I discovered an opossum asleep, the first I had seen in this part of the country.  We turned our backs upon this peculiar monument, and left it in its loneliness and its grandeur—­“clothed in white sandstone, mystic, wonderful!”

From hence we travelled nearly west, and in seventeen miles came to some very high sandhills, at whose feet the river swept.  We followed round them to a convenient spot, and one where our horses could water without bogging.  The bed of the Finke is the most boggy creek-channel I have ever met.  As we had travelled several miles in the morning to the pillar, and camped eighteen beyond it, it was late in the afternoon when we encamped.  The country we passed over was mostly scrubby sandhills, covered with porcupine grass.  Where we struck the channel there was