It is now getting too warm for the men to sit or stand still, for there is no wind; indeed, not the slightest movement of the air. So Claude and his companions rise and stroll across the hot, flat fragments of rock towards the other side of the table-topped hill. Here and there a lively lizard or an emerald snake attracts the eye for an instant, but little else of interest is to be seen. Presently, however, Angland stands in amazement before a level expanse of rock; for he is apparently upon a sandy sea-shore, from which the waves that left those ripple marks have but just now ebbed away. He can almost imagine that he hears the surf still rippling over those almost red-hot stones at his feet, so recent does everything appear. Here lie numerous shells of the succulent and delicious _pipi_, at the sight of which Claude’s memory flashes back to many a delightful picnic in the land of the Maori; star-fish, echina, seaweed, cockle-shells, and mussels, or rather their ghostly semblance in hard, brown silica, are scattered around on all sides where the last wave left them.
Clambering down the other side of the hill, where a fall of rock has recently occurred, Claude finds in the geological section thus formed an open page in which to read the history of the country. At a little distance below the surface of the old sea-bed, volcanic dust is mixed with the grains of silica that form the rock,—drab-coloured dust, such as fell at Krakatoa and Tarawera. This gradually gives place in the lower strata to a volcanic conglomerate, composed chiefly of rounded masses of felsite, ferruginous clay, burnt to a cinder, and silicious, iron-stained nodules. The old sea-beds have long ago received the red-hot ejecta from some great eruption, and then, the land rising, gradually pushed back the ocean. Next come the centuries during which the resistless sea rolls again over the land, and once more retiring the waves cut much of the old ocean bottom away, and leave the flat-topped, island-like hills as the travellers see them. And upon the last page Angland sees the sandstone rock before him with its fossil _exuviæ_, and its surface sheltering a few miserable euphorbias, where passing birds have dropped undigested seeds. The poor grass struggles here and there to clothe the barren, ugly rocks, during the few months in every two or three years when it has the opportunity of growing. Perhaps Nature will one day add another and a brighter chapter to this history of the wilds of central-northern Queensland—a chapter of forest life and copious rains. It may be so; but, at any rate, Claude, looking round him, decides that man has come upon these deserts too soon—some five thousand years too soon.