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But Reuben and Jane saw only the desolate rocks, and treeless, shrubless, almost it seemed to them grassless fields, and an unutterable sense of gloom came over them. It was a hot and stifling day; a long drought had parched and shriveled every living thing; and the white August dust lay everywhere. Captain Melville lived in the older part of the town near the water.
The lumber country brought wood to the treeless plain. The vine country brought fruit to cold northern climes. The pasture country brought meat to the grassless region. It was all service. When all the peoples of the world become developed in the art of self-support, commerce will get back to that basis. Business will once more become service.
It oppresses me yet, to think of it. The sun so pelted us that the tears ran down our cheeks once or twice. The ghastly, treeless, grassless, breathless canons smothered us as if we had been in an oven. The sun had positive weight to it, I think. Not a man could sit erect under it. All drooped low in the saddles. John preached in this "Wilderness!" It must have been exhausting work.
When this journey was made it was immediately after one of those wonderful seasons that transform these parts of Central Australia from a treeless and grassless desert to a land where the swelling plains that stretch from bound to bound of the horizon are as vast fields of ripening corn in their yellow summertide.
They ornament the city parks, they show where splendid concrete bridges, re-enforced with structural steel, span streams that once the ox-teams doubled and trebled strength to ford. They gleam where corn grows tall and black on fertile prairies; where seas of wheat have flooded barren, burning plains, and perfumey alfalfa sweetens the air above what was once grassless desolation.
"Oh, Ophelia!" and the minister's three small sons, pausing in their play in the grassless yard at the side of the house, while they watched the beautiful car standing in front of the parsonage gate, saw the owner of the Quarter Circle KT, in broad daylight, on the principal residence street of Eagle Butte, before the eyes of the whole world if the whole world cared to look throw his arms around the plump lady sitting beside him and press one long, rapturous kiss on her moist, unresisting lips!
The grounds of this palace presented a much better appearance than anything we had seen in Peking. The roads were newly swept, and everything was very neat and clean and orderly, though bare. The lawns, if such they could be called, were as arid and grassless as the great plains of Chili.
I don't know that it is possible to construct anything more atrociously hideous or uninteresting than a Base Camp. It consists, in military parlance, of nothing more than: Fields, grassless 1 Tents, bell 500 In fact, a huge space, once a field, now a bog, on which are perched rows and rows of squalid tents.
The half dozen apple-trees that were left stretched gaunt arms over sour, grassless earth; they put out faint flakes of blossoms in the early spring, and then a fleeting show of greenness, which in a fortnight shriveled and blackened out of all semblance of foliage. But all the same the children found it a delightful place to play, although Blair sometimes said sullenly that it was "ugly."
Finally, the river led them amongst plains gaping with fissures, grassless and waterless, where the only change in the flat character of the country was the sandhill formation, that exactly agreed with Sturt's description.
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