Wishing to ease the horse as much as possible, Joseph endeavoured to round them by keeping on the intervening flats, but this necessarily lengthened the day's journey, and threw me more to the eastward than I had intended.

A noon I halted for two hours, and then pushed on, the day being cool, with the wind as it had been for the last three or four days from the south.

Had the country continued as it was, we might have got on tolerably, but as we advanced it changed greatly for the worse.

We lost the flats, on a general coating of sand thickly matted with spinifex, through which it was equally painful to ourselves and poor Punch to tread.

We crossed small sandy basins or hollows, and were unable to see to any distance.