rocky precipices, they had to return and again confront the scrub. In
these circumstances, they made up their minds to rely upon axe and
tomahawk to win a way, and so next morning fell to work cutting a passage
for the horses. The ascent was also now becoming steep and rough, and on
this day some of the horses fell while struggling up with their loads.

The first day's work gained for them five miles, but at the end of their
toil they had to retrace their weary way back to the last night's camp.
The next day they cleared the track for only two miles further ahead; so
much time being wasted in walking backwards and forwards to the work.
There was no grass amongst the scrub that encompassed them, and when, on
Monday, they determined to move the camp equipage forward, they packed
the horses with as much cut-grass as they could put on them. This
amounted to, according to Lawson's diary, about two hundred pounds weight
for each horse, which, in addition to their ordinary loads, must have
been a very weighty packload for uphill work. However, according to
Blaxland, "they stood it well." They obtained no water for their animals
that night, and what they wanted for their own requirements had to be
painfully carried up a cliff about six hundred feet in height. On the
succeeding day they suddenly came on what at first appeared to be an
impassable barrier. The ridge which they had so pertinaciously followed,
had, for the last mile narrowed and dwindled down into a sharp
razor-backed spur, flanked with rugged and abrupt gullies on either
slope. Across this narrow way now stretched a perpendicularly-sided mass
of rock, which seemed effectually to bar their path. The removal of a few
large boulders however, revealed an aperture which, after some labour,
they widened sufficiently to allow the pack-horses to squeeze through.

Once through they began to ascend what they estimated to be the second
tier of the Mountains. Shortly after they left camp that morning they