The following day we went round to Alec’s rock-holes, intending to have dinner, water the camels if they would drink, and fill our casks before plunging again into the scrubs that extended everywhere to the south.  To the east a flat-topped, bluff-faced hill was visible.  While we were at dinner several natives came and assisted us, and pointed in a direction a little west of south, where they said water existed.  The whole space round the foot of the rocks here is choked up with a thick and vigorous growth of the native fig-trees, which grow somewhat like banyan-trees, except that suckers do not descend from the upper branches and take root in the ground alongside the parent stem; but the roots of this tree run along the rocks to find crevices with soil, and then a fresh growth springs up; in general it does not grow very high, twenty feet is about the limit.  There was a small creek channel, and mulga scrubs to the west of it, that grew right up to the bank, and any party camping here would be completely hemmed in.  I am particular in describing the place, as on a subsequent occasion, myself and the party then with me, escaped death there.  I will relate the circumstances further on.  Now we left the place after dinner, and the natives accompanied us; we camped in mulga scrubs at about ten miles from the rocks.  These young darkies seemed very good, and friendly fellows; in all wild tribes of Australian natives, the boys and very young men, as well as the girls and women, seem to take immediately to white men.  The young children, however, are generally very much frightened; but it is the vile and wicked old men that are the arch-villains of the piece, and who excite the passions of the juniors of the tribe to commit all sorts of atrocities.

These fellows were the best of friends with my men and myself; we were laughing and joking and generally having a good time.  I amused them greatly by passing a stick through my nose; I had formerly gone through an excruciating operation for that purpose, and telling them I once had been a black fellow.  They spoke but little English, and it was mostly through a few words that Alec Ross knew, of the Peake, Macumba, or Alberga tribes that we could talk to each other at all.  After this we got them map-making on the sand.  They demonstrated that the Ferdinand, which we had left, and had still on our right or west of us, running south, swept round suddenly to the eastwards and now lay across the country in front of us; that in its further progress it ran into, and formed a lake, then continuing, it at last reached a big salt lake, probably Lake Eyre; they also said we should get water by digging in the sand in the morning, when we struck the Ferdinand channel again.  Soon after we started and were proceeding on our course, south 26 degrees west, from the rock-water, the natives all fell back and we saw no more of them.  In twenty miles we came to the creek, and turning down its channel eastwards we found the well of which they had told