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
