It was dreadful work to travel thus in the water, and with the wet from the long brush soaking our clothes for so many hours; but there was no help for it, as we could not find a blade of grass for our horses, to enable us to halt sooner.

The surface of the whole country was stony and barren in the extreme.

A mile from our camp, we passed a small salt lake on our left; and at fifteen miles more, came to a valley with some wiry grass in it.
At this I halted, as there was no prospect of getting better grass, and the water left by the rains was abundant.

The latter, though it had only fallen an hour or two, was in many places quite salt, and the best of it brackish, so thoroughly saline was the nature of the soil upon which it had been deposited.
As the afternoon proved fine, I traced down the valley we were upon to its junction with a stream flowing over a granite bed, about a mile from our camp.

In this the pools of water were large, deep, and brackish, but there was plenty of fresh water left by the rains in holes of the rocks upon its banks.