Leaders Into Unknown Lands; Being Chapters of Recent Travel  (English, Paperback, Brice Arthur John Hallam Montefiore)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: STUART'S JOURNEYS ACROSS AUSTRALIA. 1860?1862. A USTRALIA is rightly called the antipodes. It xA is the opposite extreme to Europe in more than its geographical position. It is a land of new beasts and new birds; a land where we find the mammalia laying eggs; where trees shed not leaves but bark; where the quadruped runs on two feet; where great rivers rise from the soil only to disappear into it; where the lake of last year is the plain of to-day; where the fiery wind, the wind that brings death and destruction, draws out of the north, and the cold winds sweep from the south; where this year we may have such rain that millions of animals are drowned by the floods, and next year such absolute absence of rain that as many millions perish of thirst; where many of the birds obtain their food from flowers and cannot fly; where railways are many and roads are few; where a slight frost in the early morning will be followed by a hundred degrees of heat by noon; where all the forest trees are singular and most are gloomy; where the cherry has its stone outside, and the nettle grows to fifty feet in height; and, lastly, where five great states have reached maturity in the short space of a century?and that in a country the greater part of which was unknown a generation ago. The duty of making it known?of revealing the truth which was wrapped in the mystery peculiar to all desert regions?fell upon pioneers who acquitted themselves as men. The names of Sturt, Eyre, Stuart, Gregory, Winnecke, Leichhardt, Burke, Wills, Giles, and Warburton, are of household fame in Australia; in the mother-country they are known to many who are ignorant of the magnitude or perils of their travels. And of these names, none is so famous and none so deserving of our admiration as that of John McDoua...