In Unbroken Continuity This Great Avenue Runs For Hundreds Upon Hundreds
Of Miles, Carpeted With Feathery Grasses And Shooting Scrubs, And Walled
In On Either Side With Dense, Towering Forest Or Lighter And More
Scattered Timber.
On and on it stretches in utter loneliness, zigzagging
from horizon to horizons beyond, and guarding those two sensitive
Wires
at its centre, as they run along their single line of slender galvanised
posts, from the great bush that never ceases in its efforts to close in
on them and engulf them. A great broad highway, waiting in its loneliness
for the generations to come, with somewhere in its length the line party
camp, and here and there within its thousand miles, a chance traveller or
two here and there a horseman with pack-horse ambling and grazing along
behind him; here and there a trudging speck with a swag across its
shoulders, and between them one, two, or three hundred miles of solitude,
here and there a horseman riding, and here and there a footman trudging
on, each unconscious of the others.
From day to day they travel on, often losing the count of the days, with
those lines always above them, and those beckoning posts ever running on
before them and as they travel, now and then they touch a post for
company - shaking hands with Outside: touching now and then a post for
company, and daily realising the company and comfort those posts and
wires can be. Here at least is something in touch with the world
something vibrating with the lives and actions of men, and an
ever-present friend in dire necessity. With those wires above him, any
day a traveller can cry for help to the Territory, if he call while he
yet has strength to climb one of those friendly posts and cut that
quivering wire - for help that will come speedily, for the cutting of the
telegraph wire is as the ringing of an alarm-bell throughout the
Territory. In all haste the break is located, and food, water, and every
human help that suggests itself sent out from the nearest telegraph
station. There is no official delay - there rarely is in the
Territory - for by some marvellous good fortune, there everything belongs
to the Department in which it finds itself.
Just as Happy Dick is one of the pillars of the line party, so the line
party is one of the pillars of the line itself. Up and down this great
avenue, year in year out it creeps along, cutting scrub and repairing as
it goes, and moving cumbrous main camps from time to time, with its
waggon loads of stores, tents, furnishings, flocks of milking goats, its
fowls, its gramophone, and Chinese cook. Month after month it creeps on,
until, reaching the end of the section, it turns round to creep out
again.
Year in, year out, it had crept in and out, and for twenty years Happy
Dick had seen to its peace and comfort.
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