ladyish hands were horny with warts and corns, and this, though he was
doubled up with dysentery in the hot season, and racked by winter
cramps. But the life had proved too hard for him, all the same. During
the previous summer he had begun to drink--steadily, with the dogged
persistence that was in him--and since then his work had gone downhill.
His sudden death had only been a hastening-on of the inevitable.
Staggering home to the tent after nightfall he would have been sure,
sooner or later, to fall into a dry shicer and break his neck, or into a
wet one and be drowned.

On the surface of the Gravel Pit his fate was already forgotten. The
rude activity of a gold-diggings in full swing had closed over the
incident, swallowed it up.

Under a sky so pure and luminous that it seemed like a thinly drawn veil
of blueness, which ought to have been transparent, stretched what, from
a short way off, resembled a desert of pale clay. No patch of green
offered rest to the eye; not a tree, hardly a stunted bush had been left
standing, either on the bottom of the vast shallow basin itself, or on
the several hillocks that dotted it and formed its sides. Even the most
prominent of these, the Black Hill, which jutted out on the Flat like a
gigantic tumulus, had been stripped of its dense timber, feverishly
disembowelled, and was now become a bald protuberance strewn with gravel
and clay. The whole scene had that strange, repellent ugliness that goes
with breaking up and throwing into disorder what has been sanctified as
final, and belongs, in particular, to the wanton disturbing of earth's
gracious, green-spread crust. In the pre-golden era this wide valley,
lying open to sun and wind, had been a lovely grassland, ringed by a
circlet of wooded hills; beyond these, by a belt of virgin forest. A
limpid river and more than one creek had meandered across its face;