Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/70

 largely a very graceful kind of broom, interspersed with Banksias from twelve to fourteen feet in height, whose bottle-brush shaped blossoms were now maturing into large amber-coloured cones. Without this vegetation, however, we might have fancied that the sandy flat over which we were crawling was the head of an estuary, to be overflowed with the next spring-tide, and that the Darling Range before us was an existing boundary line betwixt sea and land.

At the foot of Green Mount, where a road party had already commenced the solid causeway which at the present day puts such imaginings to flight, the sand mercifully came to an end, and we got out of the dog-cart to relieve our horse by walking up the steep ascent. The nearer that I reached the summit of the mount, the greater became my admiration of the scenery that lay around me. On every side as far as the eye could reach it was all green forest, excepting in one direction where the sea lay dimly upon the remote horizon, and a thin shining light revealed the course of the Swan. The beautiful round masses of tree-tops upon which we looked down were varied only by sunshine and cloud shadows, with here and there the rising smoke of a bush-fire; the oneness of the scene being so complete, that strange to say, it recalled the idea of standing on the deck of a ship and seeing nothing but water all around. Close at hand, and descending steeply to a valley filled with broken fragments, was a bold mass of rock, some twelve or fifteen feet in height, off which a man sprang in the early days of the colony, with a spear in his back, when escaping from a party of natives who disputed his first attempt at driving cattle over the