[Durack, Mary, 1969, The Rock and the Sand, Constable, London, Chapter 4]
CHAPTER FOUR
1896-1890
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The news of these ‘brothers’ of the good men who had once lived among them went before the travellers from tribe to tribe and they were everywhere received with the same gestures of goodwill. The Njul Njul people near Beagle Bay led them through the pindan to a park-like area of spreading white-gums and paperbarks where spring-fed pools, lily-covered and set about with palms and ferns, attracted flocks of wild duck, parrots and cockatoos, ibis, brolgas, cranes, and twittering flocks of jewel-bright finches. Wreathed in early-morning mist and touched with the glow of sunrise, it was a place of such wild beauty that the abbot, like the prophet Moses beholding the Promised Land, fell on his knees and gave thanks to God. Here, in the desolate wilderness, was at last a place of fertility, a site where they might one day build an abbey to ’swim upon fountains’ like the monastery of Fontenay in the distant woods of France.
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