.238 THE RETURN JOURNEY. 



After reaching the Gulf of Carpentaria, there remained nothing 

 more for Burke and his three companions but to retrace their steps to 

 their depot at Cooper's Creek. But their energies were exhausted, 

 and from the beginning of April their provisions failed them. At the 

 close often or twelve days' march, they were constrained to kill a 

 horse. In the following week, Gray succumbed to the excessive 

 fatigue. The three survivors dragged themselves on to the depot, 

 where they arrived on the morning of the 21st of April. But the 

 men whom they had left in charge had taken their departure that 

 very morning, after waiting long beyond the time originally fixed for 

 their return. 



" You may imagine our consternation," says Wills in his Journal, 

 under the date of April 21st; " four months of harassing marches and 

 privations of every kind had completely exhausted our strength. It 

 was an extremely difficult task for either of us to accomplish a dis- 

 tance of only a few yards. The effort necessary to ascend the smallest 

 elevation of the ground, even without a burden, induces an inde- 

 scribable sensation of pain and helplessness, and the general lassitude 

 makes one unfit for anything." 



There was no resource now but to rejoin Brahe and his men, if 

 possible. Before quitting the depot, the latter had left a small supply 

 of provisions, which proved eminently serviceable. On the 23rd 

 Burke, Wills, and King resumed their march, at the rate of four or 

 five miles a-day, in the direction of Mount Despair, which was about 

 sixty miles distant, and where were placed the most advanced posts, 

 northward, of South Australia. A terrible fatality, however, seemed 

 to pursue them; one of their camels, Landa, perished in a bog; the 

 other, Rajah, they were soon forced to kill for food; then they them- 

 selves were compelled by sheer exhaustion to return to the depot, 

 which, meanwhile, had been revisited by Brahe without his discover- 

 ing a trace of their brief sojourn. Thus abandoned to perish in the 

 Desert, they existed upon the bounty of such natives as they met 

 with, and who occasionally supplied them with a few fish and a little 

 nardoo, an aquatic plant whose pounded seeds the aborigines make 



