On the Wool Track #224663

If the people in Mars are watching the earth through telescopes just now, when they are close to it, the place that must puzzle them will be Australia. Because when last they were close to the earth-u two years ago — Australia was pink. Now it is green. And if they could watch it they would see it change almost every year. In some years the centre of it does actually become a desert-ma red sandy desert, with the surface blown off it and piled in sandhills by any wind that comes along. And then down comes the rain in the proper part of the month, and the particular grass or herb, or even tree, which this extraordinary Australian nature has marked up on her calendar against that particular day or two, comes up and turns the land into a wheatfleld. It is as though England and the Sahara Desert got mixed, and one was always flushing up for the time and effacing the other.