We got over, certainly, but to see one's horses and loads sinking bodily in a mass of quaking quicksand is by no means an agreeable sight, and it was only by urging the animals on with stock-whips, to prevent them delaying, that we accomplished the crossing without loss.

Our riding horses got the worst of it, as the bed was so fearfully ploughed up by the pack-horses ahead of them.

The whole bed of this peculiar creek appears to be a quicksand, and when I say it was nearly a quarter of a mile wide, its formidable nature will be understood.

Here a stream of slightly brackish water was trickling down the bed in a much narrower channel, however, than its whole width; and where the water appears upon the surface, there the bog is most to be apprehended.

Sometimes it runs under one bank, sometimes under the opposite, and again, at other places the water occupies the mid-channel.