Some
scenes live undimmed in our memories for a lifetime--scenes where we have
seemed onlookers rather than actors seeing every detail with minute
exactness--and that scene with its mingling of glorious beauty, human
pathos, and soft, subdued sound, will bye, I think, in the memory of most
of us for many years to come:
"In the midst of life we are in death," the Maluka read, standing among
that drooping crimson splendour and at his feet lay the open grave,
preaching silently its great lesson of Life and Death, with, beside it,
the still quiet form of the traveller whose last weary journey had ended;
around it, bareheaded and all in white, a little band of bush-folk,
silent and reverent and awed; above it, that crimson glory, and all
around and about it, soft sun-flecked bush, murmuring sounds, flooding
sunshine, and deep azure blue distances. Beyond the bush, deep azure
blue, within it and throughout it, flooding sunshine and golden ladders
of light; and at its sun-flecked heart, under that drooping
crimson-starred canopy of soft greygreen, that little company of
bush-folk, standing beside that open grave, as Mother Nature, strewing
with flowers the last resting place of one of her children, scattered
gently falling scarlet blossoms into it and about it.
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