and came to the rich, black soil that surrounded the ancient cone of
Warrenheip, he mused on his personal relation to the place he had just
left. And not for the first time he asked himself: what am I doing here?
When he was absent from Ballarat, and could dispassionately consider the
life he led there, he was so struck by the incongruity of the thing
that, like the beldame in the nursery-tale, he could have pinched
himself to see whether he waked or slept. Had anyone told him, three
years previously, that the day was coming when he would weigh out soap
and sugar, and hand them over a counter in exchange for money, he would
have held the prophet ripe for Bedlam. Yet here he was, a full-blown
tradesman, and as greedy of gain as any tallow-chandler. Extraordinary,
aye, and distressing, too, the ease with which the human organism
adapted itself; it was just a case of the green caterpillar on the green
leaf. Well, he could console himself with the knowledge that his
apparent submission was only an affair of the surface. He had struck no
roots; and it would mean as little to his half-dozen acquaintances on
Ballarat when he silently vanished from their midst, as it would to him
if he never saw one of them again. Or the country either--and he let
his eye roam unlovingly over the wild, sad-coloured landscape, with its
skimpy, sad-coloured trees.

Meanwhile they were advancing: their nags' hoofs, beating in unison,
devoured mile after mile of the road. It was a typical colonial road; it
went up hill and down dale, turned aside for no obstacles. At one time
it ran down a gully that was almost a ravine, to mount straight up the
opposite side among boulders that reached to the belly-bands. At others,
it led through a reedy swamp, or a stony watercourse; or it became a
bog; or dived through a creek. Where the ground was flat and treeless,
it was a rutty, well-worn track between two seas of pale, scant grass.