The road goes on straight ahead for about half a mile, then it twists up around the side of a hill and out of sight. It's a narrow tarseal road with long brown grass to the fence. There's a small white wooden bridge about halfway along the stretch. The creek going under it threads among the willows as it snakes across the paddock. On the left is a plain with a line of poplars and then low hills in the distance. On the right rolling hills that are bare of trees. Their only covering is grass that has been cropped close by sheep..

The land is not completely naked. It is covered by a cloak of silence which hangs above the hills and the trees and the rivers and the petty doings of men like a brooding thunder-cloud. That silence is a remnant from ancient times before the human race walked the face of the earth and will be there still when mankind has passed by.

I can't see the end of the road.

You can never see the end of it..

There’s a rainbow up ahead, sitting where the road goes out of sight. That rainbow marches off into the distance as you tramp towards it and, like the end of the road, you never reach it. A summer thunderstorm has come and gone and left behind it a shower of rain. I'm walking myself dry in the sun. Soon the shower will be gone, and the rainbow with it. That rainbow it’s the Lord's promise that the purging shall not come by water again.

A green Model A Ford motor-car comes up behind and drives past. The parents in the front seat and three kids in the back. I know the kids are calling out: "I've seen a swagger. I've seen a swagger." One of them looks back at me with his nose pressed against the rear window. I see something in his eyes. Maybe in the future, when that boy grows up, he'll write a story about someone like me. But then they’re away and out of my ken.

If I get a move on I'll soon be up the hill and round the bend and out of the sight of that farmhouse. Scones and tobacco in my swag and half a crown in my pocket. I was paid money for what I did but that did not recompense the sin. It was a blot on your memory, Shirley, a smudge on your memory, my dear.