In unbroken continuity this great avenue runs for hundreds upon hundreds
of miles, carpeted with feathery grasses and shooting scrubs, and walled
in on either side with dense, towering forest or lighter and more
scattered timber. On and on it stretches in utter loneliness, zigzagging
from horizon to horizons beyond, and guarding those two sensitive wires
at its centre, as they run along their single line of slender galvanised
posts, from the great bush that never ceases in its efforts to close in
on them and engulf them. A great broad highway, waiting in its loneliness
for the generations to come, with somewhere in its length the line party
camp, and here and there within its thousand miles, a chance traveller or
two here and there a horseman with pack-horse ambling and grazing along
behind him; here and there a trudging speck with a swag across its
shoulders, and between them one, two, or three hundred miles of solitude,
here and there a horseman riding, and here and there a footman trudging
on, each unconscious of the others.
From day to day they travel on, often losing the count of the days, with
those lines always above them, and those beckoning posts ever running on
before them and as they travel, now and then they touch a post for
company--shaking hands with Outside: touching now and then a post for
company, and daily realising the company and comfort those posts and
wires can be.
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