Page:Rambles in Australia (IA ramblesinaustral00grewiala).pdf/104

74 the engines on the track which is to join Western Australia to South Australia, Perth and Albany to Adelaide. One might speculate on what the engine from the West would say on this occasion. It might breathe a few words of the Orient, and would be entitled to add others concerning Afric's sunwashed lands, for it is not to be denied that the bulk of the liners coming through Suez, and all those from the Cape, make West Australia their headland. But East Australia touches Cathay more nearly both in climate and in steamer connections, and a day will dawn when the construction of yet another railway from Port Darwin in the Northern Territory will make that port the nearest to Europe; and there are yet other projects for joining Australia in shorter and shorter links to Panama and San Francisco. So perhaps the engines will call a truce over their claims on the older East and West, and will confine them to that newer West and fast-developing East which the Australian continent provides within itself.

The engine from the West, if it were of a philosophic turn might say that the land it came from was of immemorial age, a relic of the world before the Deluge; that its strange flowers, its bush coming as close to its towns and settlements as grass to the trees on a lawn, were older than