He leaned back, smiling. "I don't doubt you'll try. But I don't think you know me as well as you think you do."

"Do I not? Time will tell, Ralph, and only time. I'm old; I have nothing but time left to me."

"And what do you think I have?" he asked. "Time, Mary, nothing but time. Time, and dust, and flies."

The clouds heaped themselves in the sky, and Paddy began to hope for rain. "Dry storms," said Mary Carson. "We won't get rain out of this. We won't get any rain for a long time."

If the Clearys thought they had seen the worst that Australia could offer in the way of climatic harshness, it was because they hadn't yet experienced the dry storms of drought-dogged plains. Bereft of soothing dampness, the dryness of the earth and the air rubbed each other raw and crackling, an irritating friction which built up and up and up until it could end only in a gargantuan dissipation of accumulated energy. The sky dropped and darkened so much Fee had to light the lamps indoors; out in the stockyards the horses shivered and jumped at the slightest noise; the hens sought their perches and sank their heads into apprehensive breasts; the dogs fought and snarled; the tame pigs which rooted among the rubbish of, the station dump burrowed their snouts into the dust and peered out of it with bright, skittish eyes. Brooding forces pent in the heavens struck fear into the bones of all living things, as the vast deep clouds swallowed the sun whole and prepared to spew solar fire over the earth.Thunder came marching from far away with increasing tread, tiny flickers on the horizon cast soaring billows into sharp relief, crests of startling whiteness foamed and curled over midnight-blue depths. Then, with a roaring wind that sucked up the dust and flung it stinging in eyes and ears and mouths, came the cataclysm. No longer did they try to imagine the biblical wrath of God; they lived through it. No man could have kept himself from jumping when the thunder cracked-it exploded with the noise and fury of a disintegrating world-but after a while the assembled household grew so inured to it they crept out onto the veranda and stared across the creek at the far paddocks. Great forks of lightning stood ribbed in veins of fire all around the sky, dozens of bolts each and every moment;