Pan's Garden
ON this high ground grows tallowwood, and the saw-leaved Callicoma. Here spotted gums and turpentine rise, tower-tall, where once the great leviathan took his pleasure. On these rocky spurs, these razor-backed hills, are potholes, wave-worn. On these summits, even yet, the earth has the sea sand’s salt in it, and fossils, finny treasures. But the light on this risen world has forgotten the ocean.
Above these undulating ranges the sky has its spectrum of flight, its bird cycles, its winged traffic; in the upper air, companies of cranes, and curlews, cry-by-nights, farsighted voyagers who pass, unresting, from one horizon to the other; in flocks above the treetops, parrots, cockatoos, their kindred; in the higher branches, dollar birds, dusky wood swallows; sweet-throated singers in the lower boughs, and in their due degree birds of the scrub, ground birds, water birds.
By the trickle of moisture in the creek where the duck-billed platypus is, white Sally grows, and two-veined hickory, and false sarsaparilla, — la belle dame sans merci, — and those pied violets, white and blue, which are not shy, but daring.
And sometimes, coming out of the distance, there is a sound like clapping hands, and sometimes hares dance, and leverets, or spotted wild cats play; and all along the ranges’ length, breadth, depth, and in the footholds of the hills, each log, each leaf, each twig, each grassy square and water brook, shelters some creature instinctively remembering it, experiencing it. Yet in all these spreading ranges there is but one sign of man — a clearing, railings, a weatherboard hut — the first he ever put there.
Who is this who comes creeping and prying through the brushwood? Who is this who, stooping, runs to the red gum that stands alone in the clearing; who is aware of its height and diameter, its age and destiny and family, its rings and striations, its boughs and leaves and branches, its tasseled flowers and seed pods, its makeshifts and contrivances for procreation, and the bees that visit it?
Who is it who runs swiftly across the paddock to finger the morticed palings in the fence, who fumbles with the gate in the palings; who, at last opening it, will not pass through for joy of opening and shutting it; who, at length entering, marvels at the bricks in the pathway, ponders the usage of the mint and thyme and parsley growing in its borders; who rejoices in the cut lawn?
Who, kneeling in amazement to feel the planed surfaces of the planks on the verandah (profoundly considering them, calculating, guessing what sands, what winds, what tides, what ages and generations of Time have so smoothed them), who, delighting in the doormat, in the knob and knocker of the door, the paint and panels of the door, goes on tiptoe down the verandah (knowing the place is holy) to peer through the sitting-room window, tapping in bewilderment on the slats and hinges of the shutters, looking with awe on the red woolen balls on the tablecloth; who, slipping along the side of the house (dissatisfied with a damask rose there), glances with shy pleasure at the shallow pans of cream set in the dairy window sill, crosses the gully at the back of the house, and goes out, over the timbered belts of the hilltops, beyond the ultimate edges and margins of the stars, the moony wastes of space, to dwell apart — to dwell apart, smarting under a sense of wrong, troubled with doubt?