"What do I say? How do I know that you are new to the country? Simply enough! By the light in your eyes, the palms of your hands, and the freshness of your voice. Besides, when a man has been long in the West, does he stand up for want of a chair? Forgive my rudeness, but you'll learn it all soon enough.
"Talking of classes! Consider the class I represent. In this country it is a numerous one, and the Bush is both our refuge and our cemetery. As we wish to know nobody, so we desire that nobody shall ever know us; and being beyond the reach of pride or shame, we live entirely in memories of the past, through which we enjoy a keener torture than any creed or sect can promise us hereafter. If you have the understanding, you might write the book of our misery, and, believe me, you'd have an inexhaustible reservoir upon which to draw.
"Before you came out you had a different notion of Australia? Exactly! Folk who live sixteen thousand miles away, and own bank-books and fat stomachs, have one idea of it; while we, who exist like Esau, in the Red Sand itself, if you approached us properly, would give quite another. Now, I knew of a case once—but I beg your pardon!
"That old hut at the Creek Bend you passed at mid-day? Three black posts and a wreck of charred timber, yellow boulders against an umber cliff, and two dingoe pups rioting on the threshold—isn't that the picture?
"Well, if you think it dreary and lonesome to-day, try and imagine it when it was the furthest boundary west, with only the Great Unknown between the ranges at our back and the Timor Sea.
"For reasons which could not interest you, I was the first to live there. Curiously enough, my hut-keeper was also of our caste. By nationality he was a Hungarian, and in addition to other things, he was a studious disciple of Goethe, and the finest zither player I have ever heard. It's about his connection with that hut that I wish to tell you.
"As men seldom quarrel when ambition has gone out of their lives, for a year we came as near a certain sort of happiness as a remorseless Heaven would permit. Then everything suddenly changed.
"One day, after a long stretch of dry weather that looked almost like settling in for a drought, welcome storm-clouds gathered in the west, and night closed in with a vigorous downpour. The creek, which for months past had been merely a chain of half-dry waterholes, began to trickle briskly round its bends, and in the morning had risen to the size of a respectable torrent. Next day, Thursday, it was a banker, and still the rain continued. By Friday evening the flood was upon us. And such a flood as you never in your life saw or dreamed of!
"To give you some idea of its size, you must imagine this plain, from the mountains behind you to the scrub yonder, one vast sheet of foaming, roaring, rushing, eddying water.
"Opposite the old hut we are talking of it was many miles in width, and for more than a week we were hemmed in upon a tiny island (the hut stands on a slight elevation, as you perhaps have observed), with the waters drawing a line of yeast-like foam daily closer and closer to our door. There was no escape, and I doubt if either of us would have taken advantage of it if there had been.