Like You'd Understand, Anyway

The flies an affliction. Scaled a box tree to consider the path ahead with the telescope. Flies blocked and clogged the eyepiece. Attacked by ants, their bites like a bad sunburn throughout the night.

May 5th

I've directed that the bullocks be fastened by the noses to the carts, so that we might start earlier. The thermometer this morning at half past six stood at 102. Increasingly the only plants we encounter are differing kinds of atriplex with their terrible spines. The only water our advance parties were able to discover today was a shallow puddle so thick with animalcula as to be unfit to drink.

Numerous insects about at night. During the day, the flies. Whether we are out taking bearings or in gullies searching water or in our tents, it is all the same. They watch our movements, and the moment our hands are full, settle in swarms on our faces.

May 12th

A new mortification: we have left behind all scrub and rock to confront gigantic sandy ridges which succeed each other like wave trains, and we climb and descend one just to confront another. Only the smallest, umbrella-shaped shrubs in evidence here and there, the intense surface heat having seared away the lower branches. The ridges are sixty to seventy feet high and as steep as swells in a heavy gale. They appear to extend many miles to the NW. Should we find a body of water in that direction, I am at a loss as to how we would negotiate the dray with the whaleboat that distance.

Even so, the ridges exhibit a regularity that waves alone must have created. What we are struggling with, it follows, was not long ago a submarine position. “Oh, for the love of God,” Browne responded when I told him, his hat soaked through with sweat before our day had even begun.

May 19th

A week of stupefying labor. The heavily loaded drays sink deep into the sand, and the overheated bullocks just cease their struggles completely for minutes at a time. The days are scorching hot, and the animals are suffering greatly. Today the sheep came to a dead halt and would not move, while the dogs and horses huddled under and against the drays for such shade as they might provide, remaining there until evening.

Winds and whirlwinds, all oven-hot. The horses are suffering even more than we might have expected. Their legs are pierced in a hundred places by spinifex, which has in the last two days begun to cover the ridges. Both Captain and the chestnut have had a running at the nose which I feared to be glanders, but Gould reports they are better. I have an ugly rash over my back and chest. The men complain of insomnia and sore eyes. This evening at sunset we remarked upon an extended haze of a supernatural blue on the horizon opposite the sun. The effect, we presume, of refraction.

I have had some surprisingly bitter contentions with some of the other officers. More than ever I am convinced that the interior is to be achieved only by careful calculation and that additional headlong rushing about will lead us into further difficulty. As it is now, advance parties, usually captained by Browne, scout twenty to thirty miles ahead of us by horse. Both Browne and Mander-Jones believe we cannot maintain this unhurried pace with summer only four or five months away.

I hope I will not shrink from the trials ahead. The day may come when I must face greater extremes, and I trust I will do so not the less firmly for having only the smallest notion of what I'm likely to encounter.

May 22nd

Cuppage feverish and laid up. A comfortable pallet has been arranged for him in the whaleboat. A few days' inactivity while the advance parties search for water. I have directed that the whale-boat be outfitted and painted.

Hill, who has been working wonders with poor Cuppage's suffering, is really like a young hero from literature: fair-minded, virile, and eager to get on. He articled as a surgeon, which he found not very agreeable. His real passion is for astronomy, and his sense of direction so intuitive he negotiated alone some of the jungles on the northern coast. And few men have less of envy in their disposition.

All of Adelaide, it seemed, approved my choice of Hill for this expedition. And nearly as many lamented my choice of Browne. This man with the instincts and fearlessness of a native in the bush, and of a judgment beyond his station, is in Adelaide a drunkard of the lowest reputation. Hill initially and privately conveyed surprise that I would suffer such a man to be in my party, and my father too expressed violent doubts. But here in the wild there is not a more careful and valuable follower to be found. I believe him to be personally attached to me and nurse the fervent belief that this chance at achievement will have a decisive effect on the rest of his life.

May 28th

Our progress renewed. Today's resolution is “Seek experience joined to common sense, which to mortals is a providence.” The ascents are backbreaking and the revelations at the summits unrewarding.