istine beauty were the ancient volcanic cones of Warrenheip and
Buninyong. These, too far off to supply wood for firing or slabbing,
still stood green and timbered, and looked down upon the havoc that had
been made of the fair, pastoral lands.

Seen nearer at hand, the dun-coloured desert resolved itself into
uncountable pimpling clay and mud-heaps, of divers shade and varying
sizes: some consisted of but a few bucketfuls of mullock, others were
taller than the tallest man. There were also hundreds of rain-soaked,
mud-bespattered tents, sheds and awnings; wind-sails, which fell,
funnel-like, from a kind of gallows into the shafts they ventilated;
flags fluttering on high posts in front of stores. The many human
figures that went to and fro were hardly to be distinguished from the
ground they trod. They were coated with earth, clay-clad in ochre and
gamboge. Their faces were daubed with clauber; it matted great beards,
and entangled the coarse hairs on chests and brawny arms. Where, here
and there, a blue jumper had kept a tinge of blueness, it was so
besmeared with yellow that it might have been expected to turn green.
The gauze neck-veils that hung from the brims of wide-awakes or
cabbage-trees were become stiff little lattices of caked clay.

There was water everywhere. From the spurs and gullies round about, the
autumn rains had poured freely down on the Flat; river and creeks had
been over their banks; and such narrow ground-space as remained between
the thick-sown tents, the myriads of holes that abutted one on another,
jealous of every inch of space, had become a trough of mud. Water
meandered over this mud, or carved its soft way in channels; it lay
about in puddles, thick and dark as coffee-grounds; it filled abandoned
shallow holes to the brim.

From this scene rose a blurred hum of sound; rose and as it were
remained stationary above it--like a smoke-cloud, which no wind comes
to drive away. Gradually, though, the ear made out, in the conglomerate
of noise, a host of separate noises infinitely multiplied: the sharp
tick-tick of surface-picks, the dull thud of shovels, their muffled
echoes from the depths below. There was also the continuous squeak and
groan of windlasses; the bump of the mullock emptied from the bucket;
the trundle of wheelbarrows, pushed along a plank from the shaft's
mouth to the nearest pool; the dump of the dart on the heap for
washing. Along the banks of a creek, hundreds of cradles rat