We had no sooner
descended one than we were ascending another, and the excessive heat of
so confined a place oppressed us greatly. We had on our journey to the
westward found an abundance of grass on the sand ridges as well as the
flats; but in this desert there was not a blade to be seen. The ridges
were covered with spinifex, through which we found it difficult to force
a way, and the flats with salsolaceous productions alone. There were no
pine trees, but the brush consisted of several kinds of acacia,
casuarina, cassia, and hakeae, and these were more bushes than shrubs,
for they seldom exceeded our own height, and had leaves only at the
termination of their upper branches, all the under leaves having dropped
off, withered by the intensity of the reflected surface heat. At one we
stopped to rest the horses, but mounted again at half-past one, and
reached the hills at 5 p.m. The same dreary desert extended to their
base, only that as we approached the hills the flats were broader, and
the fall of waters apparently to the east. The surface of the flats was
furrowed by water, and there were large bare patches of red soil, but
with the exception of a flossy grass that grew sparingly on some of them,
nothing but rhagodia and atriplex flourished.
I had tried the temperature of boiling water at the spot where we stopped
in the Rocky Glen, and found it to be 211 degrees and a small fraction;
and as we descended a little after leaving the creek, we could not have
been much above the sea level at one period of the day, although now more
than 450 miles from the coast.
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