[10] See two other curious accounts of the effects of mirage and refraction in Sturt’s Expeditions in Australia, vol. ii. pp. 56 and 171.
[11] The artless description of this sad discovery, given by one of the natives who accompanied the party, may be not unworthy of the reader’s notice. “Away we go, away, away, along the shore away, away, away, a long distance we go. I see Mr. Smith’s footsteps ascending a sand-hill, onwards I go regarding his footsteps. I see Mr. Smith dead. We commence digging the earth. Two sleeps had he been dead; greatly did I weep, and much I grieved. In his blanket folding him, we scraped away the earth. We scrape earth into the grave, we scrape the earth into the grave, a little wood we place in it. Much earth we heap upon it—much earth we throw up. No dogs can dig there, so much earth we throw up. The sun had just inclined to the westward as we laid him in the ground.“—Grey’s Travels in Western Australia, vol. ii. p. 350.
[12] See a like melancholy history of the death of Mr. Cunningham, in Mitchell’s Three Expeditions, vol. i. p. 180, et seq. How thrilling must have been the recollections of his fellow-travellers in the wilderness at the simple incident thus related: “In the bed of the river, where I went this evening to enjoy the sight of the famished cattle drinking, I came accidentally on an old footstep of Mr. Cunningham in the clay, now baked hard by the sun. Four months had elapsed, and up to this time the clay bore the last records of our late fellow-traveller.”
[13] “A cluster of these trees would be an excellent beacon to warn mariners of their danger when near a coral reef, and at all events their fruit would afford some wholesome nourishment to the ship-wrecked seamen. The navigator who should distribute 10,000 cocoa-nuts amongst the numerous sand banks of the great ocean and Indian Sea, would be entitled to the gratitude of all maritime nations, and of every friend of humanity.”—Flinders’ Voyage to Terra Australis, vol. ii. p. 332.
[14] Although the basin of this river extends so far towards the east, on its westerly bank, that is, towards the interior, a desert country stretches itself to an unknown distance, from which it does not appear to receive any increase of its waters at all deserving of notice. From two hills, seventy miles apart, extensive views were gained of this western desert, in which no smoke was seen, indicating the presence of natives, nor even any appearance of trees; the whole country being covered with a thick bush or scrub. For the four winter months spent by Mitchell near the Darling, neither rain nor yet dew fell, and the winds from the west and north-west, hot and parching, seemed to blow over a region in which no humidity remained.
[15] So in Major Mitchell’s work, vol. i. p. 298; but the same author is quoted (more correctly it would seem from the map), by Montgomery Martin, as stating that “The Darling does not, in a course of three hundred miles, receive a single river.”—See Martin’s New South Wales, p. 82.
[16] By dry season, or wet season, in Australia, we are not to understand, as in England, a dry or wet summer, but a series of dry or wet years. At the very bottom of some of the dried-up lakes were found sapling trees of ten years’ growth, which had evidently been killed by the return of the waters to their long-forsaken bed.
[17] “I have myself no doubt that a large navigable river will yet be discovered, communicating with the interior of Australia.”—M. Martin’s New South Wales, p. 99.
[18] This remarkable animal, called also the Ornithorynchus, is peculiar to Australia, it has the body of a beast combined with the mouth and feet of a duck, is to be seen frequently on the banks of the Glenelg, and that unusually near the coast.
[19] Water is proverbially “unstable,” but what occurred to Major Mitchell’s party on the Yarrayne, may serve for a specimen of the peculiar uncertainty of the waters of Australia. In the evening a bridge across that stream had been completed, and everything was prepared for crossing it, but in the morning of the following day no bridge was to be seen, the river having risen so much during the night, although no rain had fallen, that the bridge was four feet under water, and at noon the water had risen fourteen feet,—a change that could only be accounted for by the supposed melting of the snow near the sources of the stream.