The bungalows near the bush edge had odd bits of garden nipped out of
the paddocks and carefully railed in: then another little enclosure for
the calf. At the back the earth was scratched, there was a rubbish heap
of ashes and tins slipping into the brambles, and very white fowls
clustering for bed-time. In front of the house, in another bit of garden
with wooden palings, two camellia trees full of flowers, one white and
one red, like artificial things, but a bit seared by the wind. And at
the gate the branching coral trees still flowering flame from their
dark, strong-thrusting, up-curving buds.
So, with evening falling. There were green roads laid out in the wild,
with but one lost bungalow to justify them. And a lost horse wildly
galloping round the corner of this blind road, to quiet down and look
around. A belated collier galloping stiffly on his pony, out of the
township, and a woman in a white blouse and black skirt, with two little
girls beside her, driving a ramshackle little buggy with a quick-legged
little pony, homewards through the trees.
Lights were beginning to glint out: the township was deciding it was
night. The bungalows scattered far and wide, on the lower levels. There
was a net-work of wide roads, or beginnings of roads. The heart of the
township was one tiny bit of street a hundred yards long: Main Street.
You knew where it was, as you looked down on the reddish earth and grass
and bush, by the rather big roof of pale zinc and a sandy-coloured round
gable of the hotel--the biggest building in the place. For the rest, it
looked, from above, like an inch of street with tin roofs on either
side, fizzling out at once into a wide grass-road with a few bungalows
and then the bush. But there was the dark railway, and the little
station. And then again the big paddocks rising to the sea, with a ridge
of coral-trees and a farm-place. Richard could see Coo-ee with its low,
red roof, right on the sea. Behind it the rail-fences of the paddocks,
and the open grass, and the streets cut out and going nowhere, with an
odd bungalow here and there.
So it was all round--a far and wide scattering of pale-roofed bungalows
at random among grassy, cut-out streets, all along the levels above the
sea, but keeping back from the sea, as if there were no sea. Ignoring
the great Pacific. There were knolls and pieces of blue creek-hollow,
blue of fresh-water in lagoons on the yellow sands. Up the knolls
perched more bungalows, on very long front legs and no back legs, caves
of dark underneath. And on the sky-line, a ridge of wiry trees with dark
plume-tufts at the ends of the wires, and these little loose crystals of
different-coloured, sharp-angled bungalows cropping out beneath. All in
a pale, clear air, clear and yet far off, as it were visionary.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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