Traversing first the racecourse plain, we then entered some mulga scrub; the mulga is an acacia, the wood extremely hard.  It grows to a height of twenty to thirty feet, but is by no means a shady or even a pretty tree; it ranges over an enormous extent of Australia.  The scrub we now entered had been recently burnt near the edge of the plain; but the further we got into it, the worse it became.  At seven miles we came to stones, triodia, and mallee, a low eucalyptus of the gumtree family, growing generally in thick clumps from one root:  its being rooted close together makes it difficult travelling to force one’s way through.  It grows about twenty feet high.  The higher grade of eucalypts or gum-trees delight in water and a good soil, and nearly always line the banks of watercourses.  The eucalypts of the mallee species thrive in deserts and droughts, but contain water in their roots which only the native inhabitants of the country can discover.  A white man would die of thirst while digging and fooling around trying to get the water he might know was preserved by the tree, but not for him; while an aboriginal, upon the other hand, coming to a mallee-tree, after perhaps travelling miles through them without noticing one, will suddenly make an exclamation, look at a tree, go perhaps ten or twelve feet away, and begin to dig.  In a foot or so he comes upon a root, which he shakes upwards, gradually getting more and more of it out of the ground, till he comes to the foot of the tree; he then breaks it off, and has a root perhaps fifteen feet long—­this, by the way, is an extreme length.  He breaks the root into sections about a foot long, ties them into bundles, and stands them up on end in a receptacle, when they drain out a quantity of beautifully sweet, pure water.  A very long root such as I have mentioned might give nearly a bucketful of water; but woe to the white man who fancies he can get water out of mallee.  There are a few other trees of different kinds that water is also got from, as I have known it obtained from the mulga, acacia trees, and from some casuarina trees; it depends upon the region they are in, as to what trees give the most if any water, but it is an aboriginal art at any time or place to find it.

The mallee we found so dense that not a third of the horses could be seen together, and with great difficulty we managed to reach the foot of a small pine-clad hill lying under the foot of the high bluff before mentioned—­there a small creek lined with eucalypts ran under its foot.  Though our journey to-day was only twelve miles, that distance through such horrible scrubs took us many hours.  From the top of the piny hill I could see a watercourse to the south two or three miles away; it is probably Carmichael’s Creek, reformed, after splitting on the plain behind; Carmichael found a little water-hole up this channel, with barely sufficient water for our use.  The day had been disagreeably warm.  I rode over to the creek to the south, and found two small puddles in its bed; but there was evidently plenty of water to be got by digging, as by scratching with my hands I soon obtained some.  The camp which Carmichael and Robinson had selected, while I rode over to the other creek, was a most wretched place, in the midst of dense mallee and amidst thick plots of triodia, which we had to cut away before we could sit down.