The Touch by Colleen McCullough

she was thinking, I have found one of the keys to my husband’s mind—and to his spirit, if not to his soul. He is enthralled by mechanical things, by engines and inventions, and no matter how uninformed his audience, he will talk and teach.
    The scenery was spectacularly outlandish. The heights fell away many hundreds of feet in dramatic precipices to mighty valleys stuffed with dense grey-green forests that became blue with distance. Of pine, beech, oak and all the familiar trees of home there were none, but these alien trees had their own beauty. It is grander than home, she thought, if only because it is so limitless. Of habitation she saw no sign apart from a few tiny villages along the train line, usually associated with an inn or a mansion.
    “Only the natives can live down there,” said Alexander when a big clearing gave them a particularly wonderful view of a vast canyon ringed with perpendicular orange cliffs. “Soon we’ll pass a siding called The Crushers—it’s a series of rock quarries—and on the valley floor beyond there is a rich coal seam. They’re talking of mining it, but I think the cost of bringing it a thousand feet straight up will be prohibitive. Though it will be cheaper to ship to Sydney than the Lithgow coal—hauling that up the Clarence zigzag is very difficult.”
    Suddenly his hand swept in a grand gesture, encompassing the world. “Elizabeth, look! What you see is the geology of the earth in all its glory. The cliffs are early Triassic sandstone laid atop Permian coal measures, under which lie the granites, shales and limestones of Devonian and Silurian times. The very tops of some of the mountains to the north are a thin layer of basalt poured out of some massive volcano—the Tertiary icing on the Triassic cake, now all but eroded away. Marvelous!”
    Oh, to be that enthusiastic about anything! How could I lead a life that would enable me to know the tiniest fraction of what he knows? I was born to be an ignoramus, she told herself.
     
     
    AT FOUR IN the afternoon the train arrived at Bowenfels; this was as far west as the train went, though the chief town was Bathurst, forty-five miles farther on. After an urgently needed visit to the lavatory on the platform, Elizabeth was bundled into a carriage by an impatient Alexander.
    “I want to be in Bathurst tonight,” he explained.
    At eight they reached the hotel in Bathurst, Elizabeth reeling with fatigue; but at dawn the next morning Alexander was bundling her back into the carriage, insisting that the convoy start moving. Oh, another day of perpetual travel! Her carriage led the way, Alexander rode a mare, and six wagons drawn by draft horses carried her trunks, cargo from the Rydal rail depot, and those precious cases of dynamite. The convoy, said Alexander, was to deter the attentions of bushrangers.
    “Bushrangers?” she had to ask.
    “Highwaymen. There aren’t many left because they’ve been hunted down remorselessly. This used to be Ben Hall country—he was a very famous bushranger. Dead now, like most of them.”
    The cliffs had been replaced by more traditionally shaped mountains not unlike those in Scotland, for many were cleared of trees; here, however, no heather grew to lend the autumn some color, and what grass grew was lank, tufted, brownish-silver. The deeply rutted, potholed track wound aimlessly to avoid big boulders, creek beds, sudden plunges into gullies. Perpetually jerked and tossed, Elizabeth prayed that Kinross, wherever it was, would soon appear.
    But it did not until nearly sundown, when the track emerged from a forest into open space and became a macadamized road lined with shacks and tents. If all that had gone before was utterly strange, it paled compared to Kinross, which her imagination had visualized as Kinross, Scotland. Oh, it was not! The shacks and tents turned into more substantial wooden or wattle-and-daub houses roofed with a rippled iron or sheets of what looked like tree bark