We departed from Mount Gould late in the day, and travelled up the creek our camp was on, and saw several small ponds of clear rain-water, but at the spot where we camped, after travelling fifteen miles, there was none.  Mount Gould bore south 56 degrees west from camp.  The travelling for about twenty miles up the creek was pretty good.  At twenty-seven miles we came to the junction with another creek, where a fine permanent rocky pool of fresh water, with some good-sized fish in it, exists.  I named this fine watering-place Saleh’s Fish-ponds, after my Afghan camel-driver, who was really a first-rate fellow, without a lazy bone in his body.  The greatest requirement of a camel caravan, is some one to keep the saddles in repair, and so avert sore backs.  Saleh used to do this admirably, and many times in the deserts and elsewhere I have known him to pass half the night at this sort of work.  The management of the camels, after one learns the art, is simple enough; they are much easier to work than a mob of pack-horses; but keeping the saddles right is a task of the hardest nature.  In consequence of Saleh’s looking after ours so well, we never had any trouble with sore-backed camels, thus escaping a misfortune which in itself might wreck a whole caravan.  We kept on farther up our creek, and at a place we selected for a camp we got some water by digging in the channel at a depth of only a few inches in the sandy bed.  The country now on both sides of the creek was both stony and scrubby.  Following it up, at ten miles farther, we reached its head amongst the mass of hills which, by contributing lesser channels, combine to form its source.  Here we re-sighted the high-peaked mount first seen from Mount Gould, and I decided to visit it.  It is most probably the mountain seen from a distance by H.C.  Gregory, and named by him Mount Labouchere.  We were now among a mass of dreadfully rough and broken hills, which proved very severe to the camels’ feet, as they had continually to descend into and rise again out of, sharp gullies, the stones being nearly up-edged.  The going up and down these short, sharp, and sometimes very deep, stony undulations, is a performance that these excellent animals are not specially adapted for.  Heavily-loaded camels have only a rope crupper under their tails to keep the saddles and loads on, and in descending these places, when the animals feel the crupper cutting them, some of them would skip and buck, and get some of their loading off, and we had a great deal of trouble in consequence.

Both yesterday and to-day, the 27th of April, we saw several stunted specimens of the sandal-wood-tree of commerce, santalum.  In the afternoon, getting over the highest part of the hills, the country fell slightly towards the north, and we reached a small creek with gum-trees on it, running to the north-north-west; it was quite dry; no rain appeared to have visited it or the country surrounding it for centuries.  As the sharp stones had not agreed with the camels,