In going over this dreary waste the horses left no track, and that of the cart was only visible here and there.

From the spot on which we stopped no object of any kind broke the line of the horizon; we were as lonely as a ship at sea, and as a navigator seeking for land, only that we had the disadvantage of an unsteady compass, without any fixed point on which to steer.

The fragments covering this singular feature were all of the same kind of rock, indurated or compact quartz, and appeared to me to have had originally the form of parallelograms, resembling both in their size and shape the shivered fragments, lying at the base of the northern ranges, to which I have already had occasion to call attention.
Although the ground on which we slept was not many yards square, and there was little or nothing on it to eat, the poor animals, loose as they were, did not venture to trespass on the adamantine plain by which they were on all sides surrounded.
On the 27th we continued onwards, obliged to keep the course by taking bearings on any prominent though trifling object in front.

At ten miles there was a sensible fall of some few feet from the level of the Stony Desert, as I shall henceforth call it, and we descended into a belt of polygonum of about two miles in breadth, that separated it from another feature, apparently of equal extent but of very different character.

This was an earthy plain, on which likewise there was no vegetation; resembling in appearance a boundless piece of ploughed land, on which floods had settled and subsided--the earth seemed to have once been mud and then dried.