seventh day of their journey brought them to the banks of a fine creek,
now so well known as Cooper Creek in connection with the fate of those
unfortunate explorers, Burke and Wills. At two hundred miles from Cooper
Creek Captain Sturt and his party were again met by the Stony Desert, but
slightly varied in its aspect. Before abandoning his attempt to proceed,
the leader of the expedition laid the matter before his companions, and
he writes as follows: "I should be doing an injustice to Mr. Stuart and
my men, if I did not here mention that I told them the position we were
placed in, and the chance on which our safety would depend if we went on.
They might well have been excused if they expressed an opinion contrary
to such a course; but the only reply they made me was to assure me that
they were ready and willing to follow me to the last."

With much reluctance, however, Captain Sturt determined to return to
Cooper Creek without delay. They travelled night and day without
interruption, and on the morning of their arrival at the creek, one of
those terrible hot north winds, so much dreaded by the colonists, began
to blow with unusual violence. Lucky was it for them that it had not
overtaken them in the Desert, for they could scarcely have survived it.
The heat was awful; a thermometer, graduated to 127 degrees, burst,
though sheltered in the fork of a large tree, and their skin was
blistered by a torrent of fine sand, which was driven along by the fury
of the hurricane. They still had fearful difficulties to encounter, but
after an absence of nineteen months they returned safely to Adelaide.

The discouraging account of the interior which was brought by Captain
Sturt did not prevent other explorers from making further attempts; but
the terrible fate of Kennedy and his party on York Peninsula, and the
utter disappearance of Leichardt's expedition, both in the same year
(1848), had a very decided influence in checking the progress of