We made up our minds, therefore, to explore the hill at once. We put together somehow the remains of our breakfast, enough for two very spare meals each. We took a good drink of water and filled with water a small flask which would suffice to moisten our lips and throats in case we should find none at the hill. We reckoned that the hill was not quite ten miles away, and if that were all, we should get there in time to reconnoitre while it was still daylight, and if no prospect of help appeared we would return early in the morning. Then we took our farewell of poor Gioro’s grave and set our faces to the hill. The way was quite easy; there was but little timber and the grass, although thick, was short. There were still evidences about us that the past season had been wet, but we did not find the ground boggy, and the atmosphere was fresh, clear, and bright. As we marched forward the shape of the hill became better and better defined, and more striking. It stood quite alone in the plain, from which it seemed to rise sheer upward with little or no slope. It looked for all the world as if it had been dropped from the sky, so completely without connection was it with the surrounding landscape. As we drew nearer, it presented more the appearance of a huge irregular building which had become covered in the course of ages with vegetation. But, as we drew nearer still, these odd appearances gradually wore away, and it began to look not very unlike other lonely and precipitous rocks which I have seen in Australia. Such a rock, for example, as the Hanging Rock, near Woodend, only very much larger, or such a rock as that other one a little north of the Billabong, and south of the Murrumbidgee, near the railway between Albury and Wagga. As we drew near the foot of the precipice we made for the shadiest spot that we could find. The various crags of which the hill was formed were covered almost everywhere with a foliage which differed but little from the prevailing Australian type. There was abundance of the sweet smelling shrub which is common along the shores of Port Phillip. I pressed and rubbed a few of the leaves and the smell was just the same. There was less of the blue gum and more of the lightwood than I had elsewhere seen, and there were a good many pines. There were also a few remarkable shrubs that I have not seen elsewhere, and a few large and queer-looking flowers of a bright red colour.