Читать книгу Rambles in Australia онлайн

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So much for the emotions of arrival. They are quickly submerged by occurrences which are no less stubborn in the poetic moments of reaching a new land, than at any other time. The Blue Funnel Liner had been behind her time, and had not wired her subsequent gain of a few hours; our arrival had been expected, and was to have been made the occasion of a greeting by the Government of Western Australia to the members of a scientific mission on board. Western Australia’s first greeting was to have taken the form of a garden party at Government House, Perth; and as the invitations had been distributed over hundreds of miles of a wide country weeks before, no postponement had been possible. The garden party was being held—in our regretted absence—and the Port Medical Authorities, not to be done out of their festivity, had gone to it. So there Western Australia was—at our garden party, and there peering at the land of promise were we.

Hours went by. Those of us who had hastened over lunch and wrestled impatiently with trunks and hold-alls that be they attacked ever so early never can be packed at leisure, wandered about the decks, finding that they had lost their friendliness with their deck chairs, and had become as little homelike as a railway platform. The deck-steward, who had become merely a deck-steward instead of philosopher and friend, recovered some of his old standing by telling us that we were to have an early dinner on board, after all. But it was an empty meal. We so much desired to be gone. And at last we were. The sunset had faded, the swift dusk had deepened into night, when at last we went down the gangway and stood in Australia.... It was Australia, though beneath our feet were the planks and rails of a wharf. The French have a proverb that at night all cats are grey. This wharf, might it not have been the wharf at Liverpool or Tilbury? Not quite. There was the Southern Cross overhead; and in the warm darkness there was a something—something that was not England.