252 TROPIC DAYS 



turn off (which was officially followed) leading to a 

 huge tree where in the hollow bees had hived; and 

 another straggled up the creek to the pool where eels 

 secrete themselves in the moist, decaying leaves. 



Six or seven miles from the beach, where the scarcely 

 discernible crabs, with persistency as eternal as the sea, 

 are strewing the way with millions of tell-tale pellets, 

 the track, skirting swamps, following the bends of a 

 river, passing through forest and jungle, is lost in vague- 

 ness and indecision. 



When it was ordained that roads should be defined 

 in the interests of settlers, it was natural that the original 

 track as it then existed — broadened and amended and 

 bridged by the good bushmen who had used it for 

 practical purposes — should be followed. On the plan 

 the formal road runs a strangely erratic course, for in 

 many places it is faithful to the footpad. Some of the 

 zigzags of the long past, some of its elbows and angles, its 

 stringent lines and curves, have been copied and con- 

 firmed, for the bush track is one of the fundamental 

 things, bearing the stamp of Nature, and no more to be 

 obliterated b}^ the trivialities of art than is the sand of 

 the shore and the illimitable crabs. 



