CHAPTER XIII

Summary

In the afternoon we encountered a storm of lightning, thunder, and rain, just before reaching Lapstone Hill, and whilst we wound down it we enjoyed as perfect a picture of a landscape as ever eye beheld. How I wished, and wished in vain, for some rare artist to see it with us!—and fancied the versions of its beauty that Constable, Creswick, Copley Fielding, Cox, or Turner might give to an admiring world. I have before endeavoured to describe Lapstone Hill (Chapter VII.): but if beautiful then, how much more so was it now,—with tall and graceful gum-trees loaded with their white and honied blossoms, lifting up their garlanded heads from the deep ravine,—amidst groups of the delicate, feathery-leaved acacia, whose countless clusters of pale-golden, hawthorn-scented flowers were bending with the heavy rain-drops, that glittered and sparkled like diamonds on the shrubs, trees, and deep-crimson waratahs on the rocks above us! Before us lay the green Emu Plains, the broad Nepean, and town of Penrith; the view being bounded on either side by the rocky gorge through which we looked. One half of the sky was black as night, with the yet unspent wrath of the thunder- clouds, whose artillery still reverberated grandly amongst the mountains; the other half of the Janus-faced heaven was blue, and bright with sunshine: and over both, like a beautiful spirit of concord, blessing alike the darkness and the light, beamed a most brilliant rainbow.