The Great Barrier Reef. 317 



square boulders, resembling the old-fashioned tombs of a 

 country churchyard. Leafless trees stand weird as gibbets 

 on the higher peaks. There is a bay which reminded me 

 much of the Giant's Causeway — not the first time I had been 

 led involuntarily to think of Northern Ireland or Western 

 Scotland. The Orchard Rocks are a singular group of 

 gigantic boulders, so poised that you might imagine the 

 weight of a finch or sparrow would overbalance and send 

 them thundering into the sea. One pillar upon this island 

 is thirty feet high, and as perfectly cubed as if wrought by 

 mathematical skill ; and there is a facsimile of ancient ruins 

 at the extremity of the hard sanded beach of a delightful 

 bay. 



We have now voyaged about 600 miles down the coast, 

 .and, of course, 600 miles of any kind of scenery would begin 

 to be monotonous somewhere about the five hundreth mile ; 

 yet if that travelling photographer I spoke of in a previous 

 chapter should pass that way he might bag a series of very 

 striking views. By-and-by comes Townsville, finely situated 

 under a big hill sparsely wooded at the base and displaying, 

 as its upper half, masses of red rock curiously seamed and 

 wrinkled. Cleveland Bay looks bright with its long clear 

 stretch of sand, and with houses dotted here and there, with 

 a good deal of intervening space; while upon the lowest 

 terrace of the craggy steep, itself a fair hill, there are other 

 houses — white-roofed bungalows, each with its inevitable 

 verandah. The steamer anchors here some two miles from 

 shore. At Cooktown we approach much nearer land. 



What the coast scenery of Bowen might be we could 

 only gather from hearsay, since we halt off the bay at 

 midnight in blackness and rain, but we make up for our 

 disappointment by hugely enjoying the charms of the 

 Whitsunday Passage. 



