than
I had ever been before. We were on our feet all day, of course. We
were gleaning new impressions at a great rate. The day was, I suppose,
a pretty full one; and assuredly one of us slept well after it.

IV

When my eyes opened next morning, dawn, though near at hand, had not
yet come. His pale-robed heralds were busy, however, diffusing that
sort of nacreous haze which in coastal Australia lights the way for
each day's coming. Looking out over the pillow of my cot I saw Ted
among the trees, girthing the pack-saddle on Jerry. In a very few
moments I was beside him, and in five minutes he had started on his
journey.

'I'll be in Warrina for breakfast,' he said.

I walked a few hundred yards beside him, and the last glimpse I caught
of him, at a bend over which the track rose a little, showed Ted
seated sideways on the horse's hindquarters, one hand resting on the
pack-saddle, the other waving overhead to me. A precarious perch I
thought it, but as it saved him from the final degradation of walking,
I have no doubt it suited Ted well enough.

The sun was still some little way below the horizon when Ted
disappeared, and I was perhaps a quarter of a mile from camp. Inland,
I had very likely been bushed. Here, vague though the track was, the
sea's incessant call was an unfailing guide. But it was in those few
minutes, spent in walking back towards our tent, that I was given my
first taste of solitude in the Australian bush; and, boy that I was,
it impressed me greatly. It was a permanent addition to my narrow
store of impressions, and it is with me yet.

At such times the Australian bush has qualities which distinguish it
from any other parts of the world known to me. I have known other
places and times far more eerie. To go no farther there are parts of
the bush in which thousands of trees, being ring-barked, have died and
become ghosts of trees. Seen in the light of a half moon, when the sky
is broken by wind-riven cloud, these spectral inhabitants of the bush,
with their tattered winding sheets of corpse-white bark, are
distinctly more eerie than anything the dawn had to show me beside
Livorno Bay.

Withal, the half-hour before sunrise has a peculiar quality of its
own, in the bush, which I found very moving and somewhat awe-inspiring
upon first acquaintance. There was a hush which one could feel and
hear; a silence which exercised one's hearing more than any sound. And
yet it was not a silence at all;