Moreover, two of our Moslem passengers developed a fever, which led to our being quarantined at some of the ports. We were twenty-five long days on the Equator, and it was only when the cool breezes off the Barrier Reef blew new ozone into our lungs that life again seemed worth the living.
But from the day I landed in Brisbane and started off on my journeyings in the “lonely continent” to the day on which I once more turned my face toward home I had no regrets that I had come. Australia was full of surprises and of interest for me; the beauties of New Zealand and the air of its mountains soon drove the evil out of my soul and put new life into my bones. I decided that here was a case where the desire “for to admire and for to see” that had sent me off to the other side of the world had done some good to me after all. I trust that you, too, may be glad that I went and that I have set down here the story of what I saw.
The few rivers of Australia are short and mostly unnavigable. In summer many of the streams dry up entirely or form a series of detached pools. The one big river system is the Murray, on the eastern side of the continent.
In some dense Australian wilds are towering tree ferns such as disappeared from the rest of the earth before the Coal Age and are now seen elsewhere only in the fossilized remains of prehistoric times.
CHAPTER II
THE GIANT OF THE SOUTH SEAS
THE Australians say their country is the biggest thing south of the Equator, and what I have seen here makes me think that they are right. Australia is as big as the United States without Alaska, twenty-five times larger than Great Britain and Ireland, fifteen times the size of France, and three fourths as large as all Europe.
It is a country of magnificent distances, being longer from east to west than the distance from New York to Salt Lake, and wider from north to south than from New York to Chicago. By the fastest trains, Brisbane is thirty-six hours from Sydney, and Sydney is eighteen hours from Melbourne. It takes three days and eighteen hours to make the trip by rail from Melbourne on the southeast to Perth on the southwest coast.