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‘Wild and bare, and open to the air,’ continued Mr.Newstead. ‘It takes a lot of imagination to think of villages, towns, cities, and so on—“in this neglected spot,” as Gray’s Elegy hath it. But gold rules the court, the camp, the grove, rather more strongly than t’other imperial power. Everything else follows in its train, so they tell me—Denzil and I are too young to lay down the law on these great subjects. We’ll live and learn, I surmise, as our American friend said.’

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The stakes had been duly cut, sharpened, and driven in, as far as the rocky nature of the hill permitted. There was no path or track to the wondrous spot itself. The faint footsteps of a weak, overwrought, famished man left no imprint upon rock or sand.

An aboriginal tracker on the man-hunt for foe or felon might have read, from a displaced pebble, a bent or broken twig, a deeper indent from a stumbling boot, that a white man had passed that way, but no senses less keen than those of the desert roamer could have followed the tokens of travel.