Explore "Landtakers: The Story of an Epoch" by Brian Penton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
That terrible ride through the darkness among the starlit ranges. A heavy dew soaked them and the cool night air made their teeth rattle. Exhausted by weeks of excitement and hard work, they dozed in their saddles, to awake and find themselves enmeshed in the thorny vines of the scrub. Cabell kicked the black shadow at his stirrup to urge it on, and they hurried forward again. His wounded jaw was stiff and fiery. The fever seemed to be burning his eyes out.
The gullies wound in and out among the overlapping hills. There was nothing to be seen but the sparks which the horses' hooves struck from the stony ground and the brilliant stars pinning the thick night to the sky. Behind this curtain the trees whispered and the birds cried harshly. They soon lost all sense of their whereabouts. The Southern Cross circled round them--now to the right, now to the left, now ahead, now lost behind the peak of the ranges.