WHAT THE COUNTRY LOOKS LIKE 
3 
ground of brown and grey that they do not move even when the steamer passes 
so close by them as to brush against the tangle of convolvulus and knock down 
sycomore figs from the glossy-leaved, many-rooted fig trees. 
It is a backwater on the Shire river, or perhaps not so much a backwater 
as a sluggish branch of the stream which the main current has deserted and left 
hidden away between bosky islands and the high wooded bank. The flow 
of the current is not discernible, and the reflections are glassy and mirror-like 
in their exactitude, except that the surface of the water in the foreground is 
strewn with oval lotus leaves looking in shape and even colour exactly like those 
copper ashtrays or cardtrays made in Indian ware with slightly turned-up 
crinkled edges. The scene is much framed in with overarching foliage and 
branches from island and opposite bank. On this shore of the mainland 
TROPICAL VEGETATION ON THE BANKS OF THE SHIRE 
there are tall acacia trees with smooth pale-green trunks and whitish-green 
branches, and a feathery light-green foliage spangled with hanging clumps 
of tiny golden-stamened, petalless flowers which exhale the most penetrating, 
absolute, and honeyed of all flower scents, a scent so strong that it 
may be wafted on a still, hot day across a mile of water. In the middle 
distance is a fine group of trees, elm-like in shape, growing on the river bank 
above the flood limit. In the farthest distance a few sparse-foliaged acacias 
stand out against the grey-blue sky above a high fence of reeds. In the 
nearer distance one clump of spear-like reeds rises from the waterlilies and 
shows some fine white flowering plumes against the dark background of the 
forest clump. In the foreground is a huge snag, the relic of a fine forest 
tree that has been washed down in the flood and stranded in the mud of 
this backwater. On its branches are perched darters with sheeny plumaged 
bodies of greenish-black and chestnut-coloured necks ending in a head and 
spear-like beak, so slim that it seems a mere termination of the angular 
weapon of the neck. Amongst the waterlily leaves rise the beautiful blue-pink 
flowers that are styled the lotus. 
