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The corduroy path ran out about four hundred yards across the grassless, sodden field. We then came suddenly to the beginning of a road. A small cottage stood on the right, and in front of it a dead cow. From this point the road ran in a long straight line towards Messines. At intervals, on the right-hand side only, stood one or two farms, or, rather, their skeletons.
This Robinson Crusoe looking structure was located upon the low land near the sound, while bleak, sharp-pointed, treeless and grassless sandhills, blown into shape by the winds, arose in the background, and cut off a view of the ocean, which, judging from the low, melancholy moaning coming over the dunes, was in a sad mood.
To its westward side spread the shaded expanse of Royal Palm Park, with its deep-shaded short lane of Australian pines, its rustling palm trees, its white church and its frond-flecked vistas of grass. Here, scarce a quarter-century ago, a sandspit had broiled beneath an untempered sun. Shadeless, grassless, it had been an abomination of desolution and a rallying-place for mosquitoes.
The front, toward the Hof Garden, a grassless square of small trees, with open arcades on two sides for shops, and partially decorated with frescoes of landscapes and historical subjects, is "a building of festive halls," a facade eight hundred feet long, in the revived Italian style, and with a fine Ionic porch. The color is the royal, dirty yellow.
This journey of Mitchell's was also instrumental in somewhat palliating the view held of the uninhabitable nature of the far interior; although the true character of the country had yet to be learnt and appreciated. His stay on the banks of the Darling at least lifted from those plains the stigma of a grassless, naked waste, intersected by a river of brine.
Beyond lies the main street, with some good business blocks, a First National Bank in imposing granite, and a Masonic Temple in pressed brick. The high school occupies a treeless, grassless, windswept block by itself.
The wide foliage of the maple tree, beneath which she sat, sheltered her bare head from the burning noonday sun. And here, so high up on the shoulder of the valley, she felt there was at least air to breathe. The book on the ground beside her had only just been laid there; its pages, wide open, had been turned face downward upon the dry, grassless patch surrounding the tree trunk.
The floor seemed to be rich, grassless loam, and here and there were pallets of long grass, evidently the couches of these homeless men. All about were huge trees, and in the direction of the river the grass grew higher and then gave place to reeds. The foliage above was so dense that the moon and stars were invisible. There was a deathly stillness in the air.
One yard has a level bit of grassless ground between barn and pump, and you may call it a battlefield, if you will, since famine and desire have striven there together. Or, if you choose to read fine meanings into threadbare things, you may see in it a field of the cloth of gold, where simple love of life and childlike pleasure met and sparkled for no eye to see.
But, from the moment of leaving the Buffaloes behind him, the country begins to shoal, as a sailor might say, growing rapidly sterile, treeless, and all but grassless.
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