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Later, he turned his eyes toward the battle where the shooting sometimes crackled like bush-fires, sometimes sputtered with exasperating irregularity, and sometimes reverberated like the thunder. He saw the smoke rolling upward and saw crowds of men who ran and cheered, or stood and blazed away at the inscrutable distance.
Anne had been reassured as to the need of beating out the fire and trampling down a place to isolate it, as in the bush-fires of her experience; and Rosamond related the achievements of the regiment in quenching many a conflagration in inflammable colonial cities.
As no grass grew on the poor soil, the bush-fires those scavengers of the forest are unable to enter and consume the dead wood, which formed the principal obstacle to our progress. Difficult, however, as it was to penetrate such thickets with pack-bullocks, I had no choice left, and therefore proceeded in the same direction.
After the parching heat of summer, and especially after the excessive dryness occasioned by the hot winds, the whole face of the country becomes, as it were, combustible, and bush-fires have at such times burst forth apparently spontaneously, and spread with great rapidity.
I had a heavy day's work before me, and, from my exertions of the day before, was tired at the beginning. Bush-fires had been raging in the vicinity during the week, and yesterday had come so close that I had been called out to carry buckets of water all the afternoon in the blazing sun. The fire had been allayed, after making a gap in one of our boundary fences.
Sometimes, when he had been out here ready to start mustering at dawn, he had watched the first glow of coming daylight on the summit of Ruapehu, and again, at the end of a long summer day when the smoke of many bush-fires was in the air, he had watched for an hour or more the delicate lilacs, the greens and blues, reds and golds, the shadows deepening beneath the buttresses, and the slow melting of the last warm glow into the cold steely colour of night.
The sand round Suvla Bay hid thousands of bullets and ammunition pouches, some flung away by wounded men, some belonging to the dead. As the bush-fires licked from the lower slopes of the Sari Bair towards Chocolate Hill this lost ammunition exploded, and it sounded like erratic rifle-fire. The fires glowed and spluttered all night, and went on smoking in the morning.
After this we discussed snakes for a few yards. A blue sea-breeze, redolent of the bush-fires which were raging at Tocumwal and Bombala, came rushing and roaring over the ranges from the cast, and enshrouded the scene in its heavy fog-like folds.
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