Читать книгу Rambles in Australia онлайн

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The general effect of Australian landscape to English eyes produces an impression of austerity. It is never friendly, perhaps because of the general absence of water, the sombre wooded hills, the vast dun plains, have something aloof and forbidding.

It would be difficult to find anything in life more stimulating and delightful than the first walk in a new country, where every sight and sound is unfamiliar. Strolling along the soft, hot sandy road that first morning, past the low-verandahed houses, each with its wooden palisade, its windmill and big grey water-tank, we came to rising ground overlooking the Swan River. Behind were the low deep blue hills of the Darling Range, and the broad river lay glassy in the heat of the sun, blue as the Lake of Geneva on a summer’s day. Its wooded banks run out in little spits of land with white sandy foreshores, one or two small white-sailed boats were floating idly on it, and some water-fowl swam on its unruffled surface. The foliage of the gums with which its banks are covered is dark and uniform in colour, and had the massive effect of our trees in autumn, before the leaves have begun to turn. The air was heavy with the scent of some white-flowering shrub, the stillness was unbroken except by the note of a magpie; the place seemed a paradise. So it must have looked to the first settlers, the first pioneers, who stood, as we stood, looking down on it. It left an ineffaceable impression, and we never again saw anything more beautiful than that view.