Page:Notes on New Zealand (1892).pdf/69

Rh who find their way from other countries to New Zealand.

New Zealand, moreover, is free from all those plagues which the possession of a vast, uninhabitable and desert interior entails upon the Australians, as it did upon the Egyptians of old and still does upon their successors of to-day. The dry, arid wastes of immense extent lying behind the colonies of Australia, form what I may call the Sahara of the Southern Hemisphere, and from these deserts all manner of evil things come forth. Clouds of locusts, covering the sky from one horizon to the other at certain seasons of the year,