PHILIBERTA. CHAPTER I. THE BUSH FIRE. THE sun a blood-red lamp, swinging low from a white hot sky. The thirsty earth all agape in wide cracks for rain which fell not. The grass-no longer grass, but pale-brown dust, floating away with every breath of the hot, hot wind, to join the cloud of sand travelling constantly southward. Sombre pendent foliage, sighing and moaning, living things gasping and panting, all nature wilting and withering under the torture of drought. Earth and air and sky pervaded and darkened by the scent and smoke of burning bush. The creek, a mere piccaninny stream at its best, now resolved into a few muddy, fast-evaporating pools with long dry spaces between. The horizon, one band of flame, held under in daytime by the strength of the sun, but by night revealing itself in a fiery circle of hissing, crackling, roaring destruction. Flames springing from tree-top to tree-top, leaving in their wake charred smoking ruins of trunks that stretched forth naked, knotty, blackened limbs as in agonized protest; advancing with relentless rapidity upon the yet unscathed giants that quivered and writhed and shrivelled in expectation of the dread approach. Lovely many-coloured birds, dazed and gasping, hovering in the smoky air a space, then dropping with piteous little shrieks into the red death below. Butterflies and locusts, beetles and bugs of varieties and tints |