INSPANNING

It drizzled next morning when we inspanned, and I mounted my horse in a bad temper.  I had some fever on me, I think, and I hated this lush, yet frigid, table-land, where all the winds on earth lay in wait for one’s marrow.  Lawson was, as usual, in great spirits.  We were not hunting, but shifting our hunting-ground, so all morning we travelled fast to the north along the rim of the uplands.

At mid-day it cleared, and the afternoon was a pageant of pure colour.  The wind sank to a low breeze; the sun lit the infinite green spaces, and kindled the wet forest to a jewelled coronal.  Lawson gaspingly admired it all, and he cantered bare-headed up a bracken-clad slope.  “God’s country,” he said twenty times.  “I’ve found it.”

John Buchan, The Grove of Ashtaroth, 1910