followed this feature, hideous as it is, as no doubt sooner or later some watercourses must fall into it either from the south or the west.  We were, however, a hundred miles from the camp, with only one man left there, and sixty-five from the nearest water.  I had no choice but to retreat, baffled, like Eyre with his Lake Torrens in 1840, at all points.  On the southern shore of the lake, and apparently a very long way off, a range of hills bore south 30 degrees west; this range had a pinkish appearance and seemed of some length.  Mr. Carmichael wished me to call it McNicol’s Range, after a friend of his, and this I did.  We turned our wretched horses’ heads once more in the direction of our little tank, and had good reason perhaps to thank our stars that we got away alive from the lone unhallowed shore of this pernicious sea.  We kept on twenty-eight miles before we camped, and looked at two or three places, on the way ineffectually, for some signs of water, having gone forty-seven miles; thermometer in shade 103 degrees, the heat increasing one degree a day for several days.  When we camped we were hungry, thirsty, tired, covered all over with dry salt mud; so that it is not to be wondered at if our spirits were not at a very high point, especially as we were making a forced retreat.  The night was hot, cloudy, and sultry, and rain clouds gathered in the sky.  At about 1 a.m. the distant rumblings of thunder were heard to the west-north-west, and I was in hopes some rain might fall, as it was apparently approaching; the thunder was not loud, but the lightning was most extraordinarily vivid; only a few drops of rain fell, and the rest of the night was even closer and more sultry than before.

Ere the stars had left the sky we were in our saddles again; the horses looked most pitiable objects, their flanks drawn in, the natural vent was distended to an open and extraordinary cavity; their eyes hollow and sunken, which is always the case with horses when greatly in want of water.  Two days of such stages will thoroughly test the finest horse that ever stepped.  We had thirty-six miles yet to travel to reach the water.  The horses being so jaded, it was late in the afternoon when they at last crawled into the little glen; the last few miles being over stones made the pace more slow.  Not even their knowledge of the near presence of water availed to inspirit them in the least; probably they knew they would have to wait for hours at the tank, when they arrived, before their cravings for water could be appeased.  The thermometer to-day was 104 degrees in the shade.  When we arrived the horses had walked 131 miles without a drink, and it was no wonder that the poor creatures were exhausted.  When one horse had drank what little water there was, we had to re-dig the tank, for the wind or some other cause had knocked a vast amount of the sand into it again.  Some natives also had visited the place while we were away, their fresh tracks were visible in the sand around, and on