VII 
DESERT AND JUNGLE 
95 
with the sun. As I had made the trip in defiance 
of all warnings, of course no one sympathised with 
me, and this made the remembrance of my sufferings 
harder to bear. At any other time of the year it 
might have been only a rough journey, but in this 
particular month it was something quite beyond a 
joke. In answer to the many questions I have 
been asked, I can only say that the caves were 
beautiful, but the road was rough, and, to anyone 
who is bent on a pleasure trip, I should say, Take 
it in some opposite direction. From its having 
been an unusually dry season the heat all along was 
intolerable, everything was parched and burnt up. 
The land also in this direction is mostly poor country 
and only returns a bare existence. The dry ground 
had scarcely a blade of grass, and the thin, shadeless, 
scraggy gum-trees looked more weird and sad than 
usual under the fierce glare and heat of the cloudless 
semi-tropical sun and sky. 
Most of the rich alluvial scrub lands of Queensland 
lie along the banks of creeks and rivers, and skirt the 
sea-coast. These are dense with forests of fig trees, 
with every shade of foliage, native sassafras, bunya 
and pine, red cedars, broad - leafed Leichardt trees, 
beech, ash (nothing like our English ones), 1 and many 
others, all interspered with feathery palms and creeping 
vines, forming such a thick canopy above that they shut 
out all sunlight, while their long trailing arms twisting 
and clasping stretch from one stem to another, and form 
such matted cords that it is impossible, except by 
cutting an entrance, to get through them. Below are 
smaller varieties again, twisting and bending to gain a 
passage to the light. In the early morning and sunset 
1 Though these trees have received from colonists the familiar names of 
trees in Europe, they have nothing in common with them. 
