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At noon Ailleen, sitting on the verandah of Barellan, caught the scent of bush-fire smoke floating on the faint breeze. She rose and walked to the end of the verandah, where she could obtain a view in the direction whence the wind was blowing. Over the tops of the trees she saw smoke rising rapidly.
It had evidently fallen in some bygone bush-fire, the jagged charred fragments showing where it had snapped off close to the ground. The fire had eaten its way into the heart of the timber and there was space enough in the cavity for a man to crouch. Stooping down, Durham peered into it. At the far end he saw, indistinctly, a confused mass, pushed up closely.
This hatred dates from my eleventh year, or thereabout; when I was strongly impressed by a bush-fire which cleaned the grass off half the county.
That is exciting enough to take attention away even from the oysters, for the waratah, the handsomest wildflower of the world, is becoming rare around the cities. All the party follow the girl guides over a slope into another gully. There has been a bush-fire in this gully. All the undergrowth has been burned away, and the trunks of the trees badly charred, but the trees have not been killed.
A picture rose slowly before him in the bush-fire, and in that picture he saw Scottie, the man-hunted man, fighting a great fight to keep himself from being hung by the neck until he was dead; and then he saw Pelliter, dying of the sickness which comes of loneliness, and beyond those two, like a pale cameo appearing for a moment out of gloom, he saw the picture of a face.
Their aspect is not unpleasant: the features are those of the Sierra Leone peninsula, black rocks, reefs, and outliers, underlying ridges of red soil; and the land is feathered to the summit with palms, rising from stubbly grass, here and there patched black by the bush-fire. A number of small villages, with thatched huts like beehives, are scattered along the shore.
He hates snakes and has killed many, but he will be bitten some day and die; most snake-dogs end that way. Now and then the bushwoman lays down her work and watches, and listens, and thinks. She thinks of things in her own life, for there is little else to think about. The rain will make the grass grow, and this reminds her how she fought a bush-fire once while her husband was away.
Presently the lighthouse, four to five miles distant from the anchorage, was seen nestling at the base of old Cabo Ledo, the 'Glad Head, the Timni 'Miyinga, now Cape 'Sa Leone. Round this western point the sea and the discharge of two rivers run like a mill-race. Mr. Hanno describes an eruption, not a bush-fire, and Sa Leone never had a volcano within historic times.
So swift was the advance of the bush-fire that the scrub on the furthermost bank was ablaze within twenty minutes of the time when the patrol recrossed the river, while right and left for miles the ground was covered with fiercely roaring flames. Clouds of black and brownish smoke swept across the stream, red hot embers mingling with the eddying vapour.
Still I persevered, against hope; the heat grew more fearful every moment; but I reflected that I had often ridden up close to a bush-fire, turned when I began to see the flame through the smoke, and cantered away from it easily. Then it struck me that I had never yet seen a bushfire in such a hurricane as this.
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