Out in its centre lies a village, Cohan, grown about a mountain of copper, and along the Darling are other villages, Bourke, Bremoroma, Welcanna, Wentworth, lingering on when no rain falls, and blossoming with a dripping month as rapidly almost as the herbage of the black flats. I never saw anything beautiful in them except the self-devotion of some few good women who shine as stars amongst the general blackness. But when the rain has fallen, particularly in the pleasant winter after a genial autumn, it cannot be said that the land lacks beauty. I remember winter days a hundred miles north and south from the Darling river at Bourke, when the face of nature seemed to shine in open placid beauty and to break into the tenderest imaginable smile with each dying day; mornings in June, when, awakened by the glowing log to see the flush of dawn through an oak hut or over a pine-ridge that seemed to rise mysteriously with the sun, and, as though actually molten down by the increasing heat, to vanish utterly in the full glow of day. There was no painful mockery in the mirage that hung at noon on the horizon, with its flat-crowned trees rooted apparently in the still blue water--for by any clump of broad-leaved colane or drooping myall there was water in abundance, water clear and cool in every hollow; and grass, herbage and flowers knee-deep over all the land, when the spotted leaf and trees were all abloom and the quandongs were heavily fruited, and the nardoo with its life-saving seed ripened and decayed unheeded. Often at eventide in that winter did the whole landscape seem pure and perfect as a single crystal, the sky just after sunset of the palest primrose or the colour of the neck of a wheat-stalk when the ear is just ripe; the flood water through the lignum bushes glassy still; not a leaf of any tree stirring nor a grass-blade or herb-bloom moving upon all the plain. From the multitudinous flowers of the sand-ridge comes a rare sweet fragrance mingling with the balsamic odour of the pines. There would be noise and tumult a little later, as the crested galahs came cackling homeward to rest, and then the long and solemn hush of night, with sound enough and yet no lack of peace. The whistle of the wild duck's wing and sharp blow of her descent on the water, the dull thunder of the wings of great birds--pelicans, native companions, swan, ibis, and crane--rising in hurried flight, scared by some movement of 'possum or night-feeding kangaroo. Always the tinkle of the horse-bell and the prattle of the flame-tongues within the little circle of heat and light. Beauty enough in the inner lands in such a year, a marvellous contrast to the ghostliness, the abomination of desolation, of the year when no rain falls and all life dies.