WALLIS S PONDS. 
117 
pleting the circuit of them. I did not return to the camp 
until after 10 p. m., having crossed the river at day-light, 
nor did we procure any water from the time we left the 
stream to the moment of our recrossing it. 
Having completed our various arrangements, and closed 
our letters, we struck our tents on the morning of the 7th 
March ; we remained, however, to witness the departure ot 
Riley’s party for Wellington Valley, and then left the Mac- 
quarie on an E. N. E. course for Wallis’s Ponds, and made 
them at about 14 miles. They undoubtedly empty them- 
selves into the marshes, and are a continuation of that 
chain of ponds on which I left the party in Mr. Hume’s 
charge. About a mile from Mount Harris, we passed a 
small dry creek, that evidently lays the country under water 
in the wet seasons. There was a blue-gum flat to the east- 
ward of it, which we crossed, and then entered a brush of 
acacia pendula and box. The soil upon the plain was an 
alluvial deposit ; that in the brushes was sandy. From the 
extremity of the plain. Mount Harris bore, by compass, 
S. W. by W. ; Mount Foster due west. The scrub through 
which we were penetrating, at length became so dense, that 
we found it impossible to travel in a direct line through it, 
and frequent ridges of cypresses growing closely together, 
turned us repeatedly from our course. The country at 
length became clearer, and we travelled over an open forest 
of box, casuarina, and cypresses, on a sandy soil ; the first 
predominating. For about two miles before we made the 
creek, the country was not heavily timbered, the acacia 
