The general elevation of this country was from three to five hundred feet, and all of the tertiary deposit, with primary rocks protruding at intervals.
The first permanent fresh water met with on the surface was a small fresh-water lake, beyond the parallel of 123 degrees E.; but from Mount Arden to that point, a distance of fully 800 miles in a direct line, none whatever was found on the surface (if I except a solitary small spring sunk in the rock at Streaky Bay).

During the whole of this vast distance, not a watercourse, not a hollow of any kind was crossed; the only water to be obtained was by digging close to the sea-shore, or the sand-hills of the coast, and even by that means it frequently could not be procured for distances of 150 to 160 miles together.

With the exception of the Gawler Range, which lies between Streaky Bay and Mount Arden, this dreary waste was one almost uniform table-land of fossil formation, with an elevation of from three to five hundred feet, covered for the most part by dense impenetrable scrubs, and varied only on its surface by occasional sandy or rocky undulations.
What then can be the nature of that mysterious interior, bounded as it is by a table-land without river or lakes, without watercourses or drainage of any kind, for so vast a distance?
Can it be that the whole is one immense interminable desert, or an alternation of deserts and shallow salt lakes like Lake Torrens?
Conjecture is set at defiance by the impenetrable arrangements of nature; where, the more we pry into her secrets, the more bewildered and uncertain become all our speculations.
It has been a common and a popular theory to imagine the existence of an inland sea, and this theory has been strengthened and confirmed by the opinion of so talented, so experienced, and so enterprising a traveller as my friend Captain Sturt, in its favour.

That gentleman, with the noble and disinterested enthusiasm by which he has ever been characterised, has once more sacrificed the pleasure and quiet of domestic happiness, at the shrine of enterprise and science.

With the ardour of youth, and the perseverance and judgment of riper years, he is even now traversing the trackless wilds, and seeking to lift up that veil which has hitherto hung over their recesses.