THE SQUATTER'S FOES 221 



the cattle and sheep die — of thirst as well as of starva- 

 tion, and their bleaching bones or the stench of their 

 rotting carcases assail the senses of the traveller. The 

 human inhabitants suffer almost as keenly as the dumb 

 animals. Their cows cease to give milk, and the empty 

 tanks supply no water to cook with or drink. Men 

 and women, prostrated with sunstroke or heat-apoplexy 

 or other grave illness, when the mercur}'- stands at 120°, 

 crowd the hospitals. The traveller hastens to a creek 

 that he knows in the hope of quenching his maddening 

 thirst. God ! it is dry, and he falls dead in its dried- 

 up bed. The Avild birds, overestimating their strength, 

 sink beside a lagoon that would have saved them, could 

 they have reached it earlier. 



The most gigantic of scourges is undoubtedly that 

 which has been named, the drought-fiend. If foot-rot 

 and tick slay their thousands, and scab its tens of thou- 

 sands, drought slaughters by the million. Diseases 

 travel slowly and strike individually, and are often local 

 and limited in their operation, like thunderstorms or 

 rain ; drought spreads its broad wings over a whole 

 State or the greater portion of a continent, and all life 

 dies or dwindles under the upas-blight. First, the water- 

 courses give out, and great rivers that are thousands 

 of miles in length, which, even in the ordinary Australian 

 summer are mere chains of water-holes, dry up alto- 

 gether, and the supply for hundreds of thousands of 

 sheep and cattle is completely cut off. Their tributaries, 

 on which yet more flocks and herds depend, disappear 

 still earlier. The grass, no longer nourished with dews 

 or fed by rains, withers down to the root ; if the drought 

 is protracted, even the roots, tenacious though they be, 

 are killed. Cattle and sheep grow lean and at length 

 die, and the ground is littered, as the air is poisoned, for 

 miles and miles by their decay. Siroccos, or heat- 

 waves, engendered in the torrid north, make the dweller 

 even on the comparatively cool seaboard feel as if he 

 were living in a furnace and breathing flame, like 

 Apollyon. Day after day the sun rises in a sky of 



