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melody played by the wailing winds on the harp of beautiful trees, 
that bowed their green heads gracefully as if in speechless adoration 
of a scene for which even all Nature's reverence never ceased. Out in 
that silent sea it seemed as if one could float away, like the dead 
Balder, the Sun Grod of Norse mythology, in some magic fireship, 
drifting away into the deep of time, to silence and oblivion, the sole 
refuge for all those sick and weary of the crime and misery of the 
earth. Here, indeed, on this lonely peak was a suitable habitation for 
noble souls, those who commune with the wrecked heart like a musician 
with his broken harp. Souls in whom no wind from Heaven shall 
again waken the Lydian melody of the vanished years. The mournful 
memories of the loved and lost, side by side with dead hopes and 
baffled aspirations, drifting slowly, like spectral icebergs, across the 
frozen ocean of the heart, through dark shadows deepening in the 
gloom of the Arctic winter towards the eternal night. 
On returning to the centre peak next day with Harold the scene 
was changed. Not a cloud was visible in the circle of the horizon. 
The atmosphere was phenomenally clear. We stood in the centre of 
a circle 300 miles in diameter, Mount Elliott clearly visible 150 miles 
to the south. The ocean lay silent below us ; the surface rippled like 
a vast sheet of blue steel, the distance too great to see the motion of 
the waves, and curving up into the sky-line until it was impossible to 
tell where ocean ended and sky began. We saw the whole watershed 
of the eastern and western rivers from Cardwell to the Eloomfield. 
The Johnstone Hiver, with its plantation clearings and sugar-mills, 
was seen as plainly as if we were only ten miles distant. We com- 
manded a complete view of eight coast rivers — the Barron, Mul grave, 
Eussell, Johnstone, Moresby, Liverpool, Tully, and Murray — and the 
whole of the country they drain. The sound of the blasting on the 
Cairns Eailway was astonishingly distinct, though between sixty and 
seventy miles away. To the west the horizon was bounded by moun- 
tains, vague and shadowy in the remoteness of distance. All the 
intervening space in that enormous amphitheatre was filled by vast 
plateaus, hills and peaks, ravines and valleys, all covered, by dense, 
dark, tropical jungle. 
Chooreechillum, broad based on his rock foundations, stood facing 
us across the abyss. Like Jura, answering to the joyous Alps, he 
called to Wooroonooran from the Silences, the voice of deep answering 
unto deep. These two giants of the tropics have stood there since the 
day that the earthquake Lucina delivered them from the womb of 
Chaos, far back in dark Creation's dawn. They stood there when 
Solomon was building his Temple, when Menes was buildiug Memphis, 
when the Egyptians were erecting the Pyramids, when the earth 
witnessed the Deucalion Deluge ; while empires and nations were 
rising and falling and rustling of!;, like burning paper, into silence and 
eternity. They looked down on the Pacific on the day that Captain 
Cook's white-winged ships entered Trinity Bay, and the myalls gazed 
with awe and wonder from the rocky cliffs of Cape Grafton at the 
mysterious strangers appearing thus suddenly from the Unknown. They 
have seen the Australian nation rising into robust youth, and they will be 
standing there solemn and inexorable and heedless as Destiny, when 
in coming ages,. far or near, all the record of our existence may be — 
A cry of Nations o'er our sunken halls, 
A loud lament along the sweeping sea. 
