Читать книгу Rambles in Australia онлайн

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One of the advantages of the Western Australian climate is that the nights are cool, though the spring sunshine was intensely hot. Whoever organised this Government visit to the sawmills had a very high standard of comfort, for from first to last it was most admirably arranged. We were a small but very pleasant little party, and met and talked in the friendly Australian way, in each other’s compartments. About nine o’clock a light supper was brought round, and we soon after went to bed and fitfully to sleep under a mountain of rugs. Whenever the train stopped there was a loud chorus of frogs from unseen swamps.

We were called next morning by the conductor bringing us tea, and later, while we were dressing, he came round with fruit. We woke to find ourselves already in the depths of the forest among the soaring white trunks of the karri, the early sun tinging their smooth trunks with red. The line had been recently made, and the sleeping cars were very heavy, so we proceeded slowly. There was very little sign of life; we could almost feel the great deep silence of the forest, moist, and fresh, and cold, in the frost of early morning, for it lies 400 feet above the sea level, and the temperature was very different from that of the dry sandy plains of Perth. At long intervals solitary wooden houses stood in little clearings, with grave-eyed children before the doorway, shading their eyes to watch the unfamiliar passage of a big train. More seldom we came upon a scattered village of tents, roughly put up like a gipsy encampment, pitched among the damp undergrowth. There was something pathetic in the deep isolation of these pioneers, though the near neighbourhood of the railway made their lives almost metropolitan, compared with those of many Australian settlers.