Keeping still in a general westerly direction, they crossed extensive grassy plains, relieved occasionally by “scrub” or bushes, and coming here and there upon a spring or well. “The country to-day,” writes Warburton, on one occasion, “has been beautiful, with parklike scenery and splendid grass.” In the “creeks,” as the water-courses are termed in Australia, they sometimes found a little water; more often, they were quite dry. “This is certainly,” he writes, “a beautiful creek to look at. It must at times carry down an immense body of water, but there is none now on its surface, nor did its bed show spots favourable for retaining pools when the floods subsided.” On the 9th of January they struck some glens of a picturesque character. At the entrance of the first a huge column of basalt had been hurled from a height of three hundred feet, and having fixed itself perpendicularly in the ground, stood like a sentry, keeping guard over a fair bright pool, which occupied the whole width of the glen’s mouth—a pool about fifteen feet wide, fifty feet long, and enclosed by lofty and precipitous basaltic cliffs. At the entrance, the view does not extend beyond thirty yards; but, on accomplishing that distance, you find that the glen strikes off at a right angle, and embosoms another pool of deep clear water, circular in shape, and so roofed over by a single huge slab of basalt that the sun’s rays can never reach it. There is a second glen, less grand, less rugged than the former, but more picturesque. At the head of it bubble and sparkle many springs and much running water. The surrounding country was clothed with porcupine-grass (spinifex)—a sharp thorny kind of herbage, growing in tussocks of from eighteen inches to five feet in diameter. When quite young, its shoots are green; but as they mature they assume a yellow colour, and instead of brightening, deepen the desolate aspect of the wilderness. “It is quite uneatable even for camels, who are compelled to thread their way painfully through its mazes, never planting a foot on the stools, if they can possibly avoid it. To horses on more than one occasion it has proved most destructive, piercing and cutting their legs, which in a very short time become fly-blown, when the animals have either to be destroyed or abandoned. The spiny shoots are of all heights, from the little spike that wounds the fetlock to the longer blade that penetrates the hock. It is one of the most cheerless objects that an explorer can meet, and it is perhaps unnecessary to say that the country it loves to dwell in is utterly useless for pastoral purposes.”