Page:The Australian explorers.djvu/180

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164
THE AUSTRALIAN EXPLORERS.

for the rest of the party, who were to proceed overland. In six days they made the Macadam Range, and in eight more came on to the Fitzmaurice River. At this camp the horses, which had already been greatly reduced in number, were bitten by alligators, and three of them died. On reaching the Victoria the Torn Tough was not to be seen, as she had been driven ashore elsewhere and had sustained severe injury. On the 8rd of January, 1856, Mr. Gregory started with eight men and followed up the Victoria for 100 miles. In latitude 16° 26' S. it split into two branches, each of which was in succession traced up to the vanishing point. The explorers then struck forth into the desert, proceeding on a southerly course. A journey of 300 miles brought them, on the 22nd of February, to a promising creek, to which they gave the name of Sturt, in memory of the eminent explorer. To their intense disappointment, this clue also failed them, for Sturt's Creek finally resolved itself into a sheet of salt water, to which they gave the appropriate designation of Lake Termination. Two mountains in this neighbourhood were called Mount Mueller and Mount Wilson, after the botanist and the geologist of the expedition. Once more the terrible salt desert lay before the baffled explorers. "Nothing," says the leader, "could have been more forbidding than the long, straight lines of drift-sand which, having nearly an east and west direction, rose beyond each other like the waves of the sea; and though the red glare of the sand was partially con-