It is about a square mile in extent, very pretty, dangerous to bathe in if one is a poor swimmer, as the banks are steep and very deep (the water being six feet deep only eight feet from the bank). It is locally considered unfathomable, which probably means that a forty-fathom line would bottom it. Still one could get comfortably drowned there. I have heard enthusiasts compare these little lakes, Eacham, Barrine and Euramoo, to the Irish Killarney, which is a wild absurdity, though the lakes are pretty enough to be worth going to see. The three of them, about three miles apart, are perched on the very lip of the Range, 2500 feet above sea-level, and are the craters of extinct volcanoes. Barrine is blue, cheerful and bright; Eacham is green, cold and depressing, and one has a feeling as of some dreadful Thing just below the surface, waiting for one's foot to slip. Euramoo I haven't seen, though only a mile or two away, since the scrub is impenetrable. The blacks think these lakes "debil-debil," and won't go near them after sundown.
Our party boiled the billy, explored round a bit, played the usual picnic games, and had a dip in the enticingly cool water. I, who can't swim, in spite of my thirteen years at sea, cautiously kept within reach of the overhanging shrubs growing close to the water. Then, as the cows must be milked though the heavens fall, and those who had some to put through were beginning to get restive, we packed up and wended our way home again, I going straight out to the barn to be in trim for work next day.
The next three weeks I worked at clearing a site for a house, planting panicum grass on the creek banks, and attending to the vegetables, which, with a few good rainy days, were looking well. The rainy season burst on us early in January, and for nearly a fortnight it poured in a steady, ceaseless torrent, drumming on the iron roof of the barn until one had almost to shout to be heard. By mid-January my grass was a foot high, pumpkins running all over the place, and I had about three thousand cabbages coming on well, which I thought to make money out of by and bye.
Terry and Len were timber-cutting on the former's place, in spite of the wet. When it got really too bad, we stayed in the barn, played crib, mended clothes, got axes and brush-hooks to a razor-like sharpness, and so on. One thing about the wet weather was that it was warm, and it didn't matter how soaked you got, so long as you wore the universal short-sleeved grey flannel, and changed at once on coming home. You could work then in the wet all day without ill-effect.
CHAPTER XIII.
The Cyclone.
The cyclone was heralded by a week of stifling hot weather. As a general rule it isn't hot up here, the thermometer rarely climbing to 90 deg., and then only on an odd day in November; but that week was awful. From being unable to work, it got to be an effort to move. The nights too were hot, a most unusual circumstance. Every day the sky would bank up with heavy, hard-edged clouds, leaving just an inverted saucer of smoky blue at the zenith, through which the sun appeared at noon, strong enough to throw a shadow, but not bright enough to make your eyes water looking at him. The birds, after their morning carol, were silent, and by noon each day the stillness was weird. Nature seemed to be waiting for something; there was not even a breath of wind to stir the lifeless trees. We got to have a feeling that we ought to talk in whispers, a creepy sensation—almost of fear. Occasionally there was a faint far-off air-tremor, rather than sound, of thunder. On the fifth day Len, Terry and I were lying about the barn, too languid to move, when, about noon, there was a sudden change. It got quickly cold and the sky to the South-East banked up, tier upon tier, with blue-black clouds. The zenith was covered, and the clouds commenced rushing across it, rapidly whirling and dissolving as they went, in rather an awe-inspiring fashion.
"It's coming, blokes, whatever it is," said Terry quietly.
On the word, like a bucket suddenly tipped over us, a deafening roar of rain on the roof, ceasing in two minutes as suddenly as it came, and dying hissingly away up the paddock. Silence again. Then, in the distance, a sound like a slowly-expelled breath, only continuous, and rapidly getting louder as it drew nearer. A few minutes later, and with a rush and a roar, wind and rain were on us. There was not much force in the wind—just about half a gale—but it was its sudden shock that was rather startling. Wind about S.E., and a good deal of thunder and lightning, which gave us the idea at first that it was only a heavy thunderstorm. It kept the same force pretty well until 5 p.m., when it shifted to South, and commenced to show us what it really could do. Crash after crash from the scrub near-by showed how the wind was testing the trees.