up to wait for him, but curiosity alone had induced him to come forward.  When he got to within a hundred yards, he stopped and approached no nearer.  This little delay made it after sunset before we reached the upper pool (not the one Mr. Browne and I had discovered), and were relieved from present anxiety by finding a thick puddle still remaining in it, so that I halted for the night.  Slommy, Bawley, and the colt had hard work to keep up with the other horses, and it really grieved me to see them so reduced.  My own horse was even now beginning to give way, but I had carried a great load upon him.

As we approached the water, three ducks flew up and went off down the creek southwards, so I was cheered all night by the hope that water still remained at the lower pool, and that we should be in time to benefit by it.  On the 11th, therefore, early we pushed on, as I intended to stop and breakfast at that place before I started for the Depot.  We had scarcely got there, however, when the wind, which had been blowing all the morning hot from the N.E., increased to a heavy gale, and I shall never forget its withering effect.  I sought shelter behind a large gum-tree, but the blasts of heat were so terrific, that I wondered the very grass did not take fire.  This really was nothing ideal:  every thing, both animate and inanimate, gave way before it; the horses stood with their backs to the wind, and their noses to the ground, without the muscular strength to raise their heads; the birds were mute, and the leaves of the trees, under which we were sitting, fell like a snow shower around us.  At noon I took a thermometer, graduated to 127 degrees, out of my box, and observed that the mercury was up to 125 degrees.  Thinking that it had been unduly influenced, I put it in the fork of a tree close to me, sheltered alike from the wind and the sun.  In this position I went to examine it about an hour afterwards, when I found that the mercury had risen to the top of the instrument, and that its further expansion had burst the bulb, a circumstance that I believe no traveller has ever before had to record.  I cannot find language to convey to the reader’s mind an idea of the intense and oppressive nature of the heat that prevailed.  We had reached our destination however before the worst of the hot wind set in; but all the water that now remained in the once broad and capacious pool to which I have had such frequent occasion to call the attention of the reader, was a shining patch of mud nearly in the centre.  We were obliged to dig a trench for the water to filter into during the night, and by this means obtained a scanty supply for our horses and ourselves.