She would gaze up into the heavens with a quick, sudden motion, and then her intelligent eyes would sparkle like the stars above.
I questioned her, but she maintained an unusual reserve, and, as I concluded that she knew instinctively we were approaching Port Darwin, I, too, felt full of joy and pleasure that the object of our great journey was at length about to be achieved.

Alas! what awaited me was only the greatest of all the astounding series of disappointments--one indeed so stunning as to plunge me into the very blackest depths of despair.
Yamba still continued to gaze up at the stars, and when at length she had apparently satisfied herself upon a certain point, she turned to me with a shout of excited laughter and delight, pointing frantically at a certain glowing star.

Seeing that I was still puzzled by her merriment, she cried, "That star is one you remember well." I reflected for a moment, and then the whole thing came to me like a flash of lightning.
_Yamba was approaching her own home once more_--_the very point from which we had both started eighteen months previously_! In the storm, as I have already said, we had passed Port Darwin altogether, having been driven out to sea.
I tell you, my heart nearly burst when I recalled the awful privations and hardships we had both experienced so recently; and when I realised that all these things had been absolutely in vain, and that once more my trembling hopes were to be dashed to the ground in the most appalling manner, I fell back into the canoe, utterly crushed with horror and impotent disappointment.

Was there ever so terrible an experience?
Take a map of Australia, and see for yourself my frightful blunder--mistaking the west coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria for the eastern waters of the Cape York Peninsula, and then blindly groping northward and westward in search of the settlement of Somerset, which in reality lay hundreds of miles north-east of me.

I was unaware of the very existence of the great Gulf of Carpentaria.