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The general colour of the country on the British side is brown all gradations of it from thin, sloppy, grey-brown mud, trampled liquid with the feet of men and horses, to dull, putty-like brown mud so thick that, when you get your foot into it, you have a constant problem of getting it out again. For it is the country over which the fight has passed.

Fleur's wisdom in refusing to write to him was profound, for he reached each new place entirely without hope or fever, and could concentrate immediate attention on the donkeys and tumbling bells, the priests, patios, beggars, children, crowing cocks, sombreros, cactus-hedges, old high white villages, goats, olive-trees, greening plains, singing birds in tiny cages, watersellers, sunsets, melons, mules, great churches, pictures, and swimming grey-brown mountains of a fascinating land.

The straggling gum forest, interspersed with patches of sandal-wood and mulga, that backed the head-station, stopped short at the gully, and beyond, stretched wolds of melancholy gidia scrub. Looking up from the end of the veranda, Lady Bridget could see an irregular line of grey-brown boulders, jagged and evidently of volcanic origin, marking the line of gully.

Hitherto they had only ventured abroad at night; and lovely as the landscape had appeared in the clear mellow radiance of the moon the soft silvery light boldly contrasted with broad masses of rich grey-brown shadow they agreed that it was incomparably more beautiful when viewed by the full light of day and in all the glory of brilliant sunshine.

Here two ancient apple-trees stood apart, and from one low bough, stretched at right angles to the parent stem, and not devoid of leaves and blossoms, there depended a grey-brown mass from which a twinkling, flashing fire leaped forth as from gems bedded in the matrix.

Reconstructing mythology, he had risen, a prismatic macaw, from the ashes of the grey-brown phoenix that had folded its tired wings to roost under the trees of Santa Rosa. Dry Valley paused in the street to allow Santa Rosans within sight of him to be stunned; and then deliberately and slowly, as his shoes required, entered Mrs. O'Brien's gate.

He sat down, ran his fingers through his grey-brown hair, and looking into a mirror, adjusted the bow of his tie, and flipped the flying ends. The kind of man was new to Gaston: self-indulgent, intelligent, heavily nourished, nonchalant, with a coarse kind of handsomeness. He felt that here was a man of the world, equipped mentally cap-a-pie, as keen as cruel.

Altogether he was a notable figure in his immensely tall white turban, wound with pale grey-brown camel's-hair rope, his grey cloth burnous, embroidered with gold, flung back over an inner white burnous, his high black boots, with wrinkled brown tops, and his wonderful Kairouan hat of light straw, embroidered with a leather appliqué of coloured flowers and silver leaves, steeple-crowned, and as big as a cart-wheel, hanging on his shoulders.

Farther down a pathlike level followed the side of the hill, ending abruptly in a walled fall, and a confusion of broken beams, iron braces, and section of a large, wheel-like circumference. Out beyond were other crumbling remains of old activity a stone span across the dried course of a water way, and a wide bank, showing through a hardy vegetation the grey-brown inequalities of slag.

For a single instant a smile curled the firm lips and half closed the steely eyes of the speaker, and, noting the smile and the steely gleam in the grey-brown eyes, Cameron hastily decided that he would no longer resist.