I now found that we had been deceived by mirage; the apparent islands being really such only when these plains are covered by the sea.

In many places the sandy mud was so moist that we sank deeply into it, and after travelling for fifteen miles on a north-east course I could still see no limit to these plains in that direction, nor could I either then or on any subsequent occasion find the channel which connected them with the sea.

The only mode of accounting for their being flooded is to suppose that the sea at times pours in over the low land which lies to the north of the Gascoyne, and flows northward through channels which will be seen in the chart of this part of the country; but I then believed, and still consider, that there is hereabouts a communication with some large internal water.
We saw no tracks of natives and only a few of emus and native dogs.

The few portions of rising ground which lay near the edge of these extensive plains were sandy, scrubby, and unpromising; but what we saw was so little that no opinion of the country could fairly be deduced from it.

We dug in several places on the flats and in their vicinity but all the water we could find was salt; whereas in the narrow range of sandhills separating them from the sea we had discovered abundance of fresh water only four or five feet below the surface of the valleys lying between these hills.