I passed through an extensive belt of tall, and remarkably straight trees, growing very close together. The trunks were branchless for a long way up, 25 feet of clear stem being not uncommon. To this very respectable forest tree there had been given the name of mulga, a misnomer truly, judged by the standards of the south.
But of them all the most to be admired had a stem, straight and slender, 30 feet or more in height, leafless; but bearing on every branch large numbers of a bright red flower, in shape, resembling very much the fuchsia!
And of flowers there are not many on the Overland. From the MacDonnell Ranges, right up to Powell's Creek, my only "button hole," was a large bell-shaped, blue flower, growing on a bush about 3 feet in height; but, Diamond, I bedecked with yellow wattle blossom wherever it could be got. Beyond Daly Waters, a little round flower, like a "billy-button"—white, blood-red or variegated—replaced the larger, and more quickly, withering blue-bell.
* * * *
This day, like every other day up there, was "blazing" hot. Parts of the road, too, were unsafe; and my waterbag, from being knocked about, and worn thin in places, allowed the water to evaporate quickly (truth to tell, I had soon drunk it all rather than have this occur), and a stretch of 35 miles had to be cycled over before more was got. Yet, notwithstanding these things, the ride from Frew's to Daly Waters, all through dense forest, lingers in my memory as making one of the most enjoyable day's cycling I ever had.
* * * *
The feeling of loneliness had to a great extent worn off. I had, it may be, become inured to it. Still, the change of scene and country was so marked and impressive that often throughout the ride, in the lasting gloom and shadow of countless solemn giant trees, encompassed by a penetrating solitude, I experienced again those indescribable sensations to which I had not been for many a day susceptible—mystic sensations of a hushed expectant awe as in the presence of a something living, breathing, but unseen, intangible. As I passed by I glanced into an opening, or looked far back between the trunks where trees were scattered—and it seemed to me so very strange that nothing should be moving there!
Yet this sense of being alone with throbbing nature—the hidden influence—was not by any means unhappy. It was a restful feeling—a feeling of peacefulness, as though one had awakened from a long, long sleep, to find oneself in a calm and weird existence somewhere beyond the state of life: a borderland arrived at after death.
And the toil and turmoil of existence in the world which had been left behind, viewed from the distance, appeared now to be so very purposeless; its work-a-day prosaic rounds and its confinement so very galling; its dead-sea-apple pleasures so few and short-lived; its miseries, so many and enduring; the worth of it all so very little that the consciousness of having to again return to it was as a jarring note.
And in the vast immensity of towering forest the thought of quiet Death was no unwelcome one. I realised so clearly what an insignificant atom this was which moved through it, as an ant might—so insignificant that, had the certain prospect of the atom's end appeared, for anyone to fuss or mourn over such a trivial incident as that death would be, seemed extravagant, as absurd as to mourn the withering of a blade of grass or the falling of a leaf.