He subsequently encouraged Major Roudaire, who wished to transform the Sahara desert into an inland sea.
Shortly below Kut-el-Amara all traces of ancient canalization on the east side vanish, and it would appear as though much of that region, now largely under water at flood time, constituted an inland sea.
Continuing in a north-easterly direction Oxley struck the Macquarie river at a place he called Wellington, and from this place in the following year he organized a second expedition in hopes of discovering an inland sea.
But beyond the eastern shores of the Caspian no system of direct geodetic measurements by first-class triangulation has been possible, and the surveys of Asiatic Russia are separated from those of Europe by the width of that inland sea.
Eastwards of this the great Kashgar depression, which includes the Tarim desert, separates Russia from the vast sterile highlands of Tibet; and a continuous series of desert spaces of low elevation, marking the limits of a primeval inland sea from the Sarikol meridional watershed to the Khingan mountains on the western borders of Manchuria, divide her from the northern provinces of China.
