of a sand ridge, jutting out on the stony desert.  I was rather disappointed, but not altogether surprised, to find the latter nothing more nor less than the stony rises that we had before met with, only on a larger scale and not quite as undulating.  During the afternoon several crows came to feed on the plain.  They came from an east-north-east direction, no doubt from a portion of the creek that flows through the forest that we left on our right.  In the morning, as we were loading, a duck passed over, but it was too dark to see which way it went.

Sunday, 23rd December.—­At five A.M. we struck out across the desert in a west-north-west direction.  At four and a-half miles we crossed a sand ridge, and then returned to our north-west by north course.  We found the ground not nearly as bad for travelling on as that between Bulloo and Cooper’s Creek.  In fact I do not know whether it arose from our exaggerated anticipation of horrors or not, but we thought it far from bad travelling ground, and as to pasture it is only the actually stony ground that is bare, and many a sheep run is in fact worse grazing ground than that.  At fifteen miles we crossed another sand ridge, for several miles round which there is plenty of grass and fine salt bush.  After crossing this ridge we descended to an earthy plain, where the ground was rather heavy, being in some places like pieces of slaked lime, and intersected by small watercourses; flocks of pigeons rose from amongst the salt bushes and polygonum; but all the creeks were dry, although marked by lines of box timber.  Several gunyahs of the blacks were situated near a waterhole that had apparently contained water very lately, and heaps of grass were lying about the plains, from which they had beaten the seeds.  We pushed on, hoping to find the creeks assuming an improved appearance, but they did not, and at one o’clock we halted, intending to travel through part of the night.  About sunset, three flocks of pigeons passed over us, all going in the same direction, due north by compass, and passing over a ridge of sand in that direction.  Not to have taken notice of such an occurrence would have been little short of a sin, so we determined to go eight or ten miles in that direction.  Starting at seven o’clock P.M., we, at six miles, crossed the ridge over which the birds had flown, and came on a flat, subject to inundation.  The ground was at first hard and even like the bottom of a claypan, but at a mile or so, we came on cracked earthy ground, intersected by numberless small channels running in all directions.  At nine miles we reached the bed of a creek running from east to west:  it was only bordered by polygonum bushes, but as there was no timber visible on the plains, we thought it safer to halt until daylight, for fear we should miss the water.  At daylight, when we had saddled, a small quantity of timber could be seen at the point of a sand ridge about a mile and a half or two miles to the west of us, and on going there we found a fine creek, with a splendid sheet of water more than a mile long, and averaging nearly three chains broad:  it is, however, only two or three feet deep in most parts.